


I've Already Hit the Low

by MermaidMayonnaise



Category: Big Mouth (Cartoon)
Genre: And subtly pines for Nick, Andrew stumbles through his life, Frottage, I feel like a pioneer, I would apologize for all the bad things I'm doing to Andrew but it looks like canon out-classed me, M/M, Porn Addiction, Self-Hatred, This is one of the first fics for the fandom, even though he canonically likes Missy we all just glossed over S1E3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-22
Updated: 2019-03-08
Packaged: 2019-08-27 10:15:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 27,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16700569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MermaidMayonnaise/pseuds/MermaidMayonnaise
Summary: "Andrew had read something the other day about how the only way you really exist is how you interact with other people. Was life just how other people perceived you?"--------------------------------------------------------Andrew may be going through some changes, but he's stumbling through as he tries to handle both his libido and his newfound crush on his diminutive best friend.He never asked for puberty-- but then again, nobody did.





	1. Life is Hard

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nothing happens besides an introduction to the characters and my style of writing, but I do erect several dick jokes in the text. (That was a stretch.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like a pioneer for this fandom. As of now, this fic is #25. I have complete confidence that this show will get the recognition and the fanbase it deserves.  
> Meanwhile I'll be drawing fanart, writing fic, and waiting for the third season to arrive.

Seventh grader Andrew Glouberman of Bridgeton Middle School was proud to say that he was perfectly normal, thank you very much.

And if ‘perfectly normal’ was a synonym for a perverted social-anxiety ridden geek, then the definition fit Andrew like a leopard leotard. Except Andrew’s admittedly dumpy form would probably not support a leotard very well, so maybe the term didn’t fit him in the simile as well as in real life.

Real life sucked ass. It was Maury’s fault.

 

Andrew never asked for puberty. He never walked up to the desk of a concierge and said, “Hey, you know what I _really_ want? To feel like shit seventy percent of the time and have to shave the other thirty percent.” If he ever filled out a questionnaire, he shuddered to imagine what the questions on it would be.

_Question 1: How many pubic hairs do you currently have?_

_Question 1 choices: 0, 1, 3, too many to count._

_Question 2: On a scale of 1 to 10, how horny do you think you will feel after puberty?_

_Question 2 choices: 1, 5, 10, 15._

_Question 3: How would you feel about constantly being hard?_

Question 3 was an essay response.

Sadly and predictably, Maury had made Andrew take this questionnaire the period after he first appeared in Andrew’s sexual education class. The period after that was history, and they were learning something of Ancient Mesopotamia. He couldn’t have cared less. Did it matter that they developed the modern calendar and cuneiform?

(Okay, maybe the modern calendar wasn’t the best example.)

Anway, Andrew took the quiz during history when he was supposed to be taking notes. His response to the essay question was just:

_Wouldn’t that be painful?_

When Maury handed the questionnaire back to Andrew an hour later, wrinkled and covered with unidentifiable stains, Andrew saw an answer written in red pen. _No, but everyone can see it! :P_

Maury had drawn an erect dick next to the emoji. Joy.

If this was what hormones did to a person, he refused to participate. Logically, Andrew resolved not to masturbate. Unfortunately he broke his resolution less than half an hour later in the bathroom after excusing himself from seventh period Spanish, and then again in his room at seven thirty at night. Hasta la vista, bitches.

At least he turned over the picture frames. He was a decent man, after all.

 

Andrew and Nick walked together every morning to school. The two lived right next door to each other and had been best friends as long as each of them could remember. This consequently meant that the two of them could talk about anything. This was mostly because Nick’s inability to say no and Andrew’s lack of boundary understanding.

Andrew was recounting his new sexual prowess in detail to Nick and for his part Nick was trying his best to look unembarrassed at his friend’s obtuseness.

“Am I going to exclusively talk about masturbation from now on?” Andrew said to Nick, who signed forlornly. “Absolutely,” Andrew answered himself, smiling self-satisfactorily.

Nick, for his part, was incredibly jealous. In terms of puberty, Nick had missed the bus, the train, and somehow the last barge leaving off the island. At this point in his middle school career, every teenage boy had at least started showing the secondary characteristics.

He had them memorized by now: body and facial hair, Adam’s apple, broadening of shoulders, secretion of the oil and sweat glands. Before this time, Nick had never looked on Wikipedia for education purposes. He didn’t even know what the world ‘secretion’ meant. But it was all in the name of science.

Andrew, for his part, did not dare tease Nick about his lack of sexual prowess. This was because of two reasons: Nick’s self confidence was unwavering and somehow unnerving, and also he was actively trying to date Gina, while Andrew was stuck jerking it to a magazine photograph beach body with a sloppily cut out picture of his father’s associate Susan taped onto it. Making fun of Nick not having grown a single pubic hair was opening the door to a deluge of jokes about Andrew’s own private habits.

And that was a can of worms that Andrew preferred to have sealed, preferably forever. Not only did he have a perpetual hard-on, but he was the one who also had to deal with it. If getting off didn’t feel so good, Andrew might have described it as a tedious chore.

Andrew was currently describing his current situation to Nick, who was not appreciative, to say the least.

“Andrew?” Nick, who was still next to him, said after being forced to listen to the deluge of unwanted explicit details. “Shut the fuck up.”

 

Andrew had a bit of a secret that he meditated upon as he walked with Nick on the crumbling sidewalk that eventually led to the school. The hidden truth was that he had a teeny, tiny, absolutely _massive_ crush on his best friend. This was one thing that puberty actually helped him with, because it helped Andrew discover his crush in the first place.

How? Well, that was a bit embarrassing. One fateful Wednesday he was going through his daily routine. Andrew shooed Maury away, stuck his hands down his pants, and did his thing. As he masturbated (that was such an ugly word, who even thought of that?), he went into his headspace and started imagining things as he always did.

Let’s see, what’s on the menu for today? Porn, that Indian woman on the front of the gel container. More porn, that particularly _plump_ tomato… and Nick.

He stopped doing what he was doing as his hand stilled. Huh. That was new. Andrew had never thought about the things that Nick’s big mouth could do. Could do to _him._

...

Oh, and Andrew was probably bisexual. He had the realization shortly after he... finished. He’d deal will the impacts of that later.

Damn. Somehow he had managed to pop another boner, shivering in his beige sweatshirt next to Nick early in the morning chill. Jesus fucking Christ.

God, why did puberty have to be so _hard_?

That was a pun. He was glad that his thoughts were only in his head. It would suck if they were being transcribed somewhere, and this way no one would know what an idiot he was. Good thing...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not sure exactly where this story will go yet, but it will probably be a retelling of the show from Andrew's POV and my own persceptive. I vaguely remember the show, having binged it in three days, so this should be interesting.
> 
> Comments make my day, and kudos make the world go round.


	2. Life is a Trudge

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which nothing happens, but I have a great deal of fun writing Andrew's (my) idiotic thought process. 12/10/18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In other news, I've figured out where this story is going, so that's a big step forward from the 8k and 35 page outline of useless jokes that I have.

Andrew was trudging through the snow, or more accurately, sludge. Nick trod beside him as he scrolled through something on his phone. 

It was a frigid Monday morning, and Andrew was just as miserable as ever. He was always in some bad mood or another, but he wrapped it up in a wad of apathy and called it a day.

Surely it was because of winter and the inevitable dose of seasonal affective disorder that came along with it. But lately, it seemed as though Andrew was one of the only ones affected by it.

Nick remained coolly unaffected, as always. He was always laid-back, always chill. Sure, he was about the size of a box bush and his voice strongly resembled a squeaky toy when he got upset, but for the most part, Nick resembled a cucumber. As in calm. As in cool as a cucumber. (Nick also said that he was like a Tic-Tac with shoes, but that didn’t come from Andrew’s mouth.) Why did Andrew even  _ try _ to mentally articulate his thoughts?

To be honest, Nick probably could have been popular if he wasn't Andrew's best friend. Andrew felt bad about that because it felt like sometimes he was holding his friend back. But Nick's absurdly high self-esteem more than made up for his lack of popularity.

Nick, as a general rule, was liked by everyone. He was easygoing, friendly, and just enough of a douche to seamlessly blend into today's society of technologically obsessed assholes.

Andrew wasn't bitter; really, he wasn't. Although he didn't actively enjoy being a wallflower, there were advantages to being able to fade into the background.

But sometimes, he just wished that he was a little bit more noticeable. 

“Holy shit,” Nick said, staring at his phone. “A video of you just went viral.”

Andrew had a bad feeling about that. Be careful what you wish for, moron.

Was it that time he did that thing at the time? There was also that time he threw a wad of his masturbation socks in the dumpster, at least he thought that was what happened. Shit, maybe it hadn’t happened yet. What if his lie was just a big lie, a fantastical creation made up by some teenager who was just as much a geek as he was?

Impossible. Andrew dismissed the thought. His life was too absurd for someone to fabricate.

“I’m just kidding.” Nick smiled easily, amused by how Andrew instantly turned white. “You’re too easy to rile up, you know that, right?”

Andrew tried to catch his breath. “You know I’ve done lots of embarrassing things. What if it ruins my chances for college?”

“You’re definitely smart enough. You take AP classes. You have a 4.0 GPA. You wear glasses, for crying out loud.”

Andrew pushed said glasses up his nose self-consciously. “Having terrible eyesight doesn’t make you intelligent.”

“But it sure makes you look it.” Nick brushed him off. “Hey, are you going to the school dance this Saturday?”

“Isn’t the theme Ancient Mesopotamia?”

“Yep.” Nich popped the ‘p.’

“That… sounds a little lame.”

“Of course it does, it’s a school dance,” Nick scoffed, raising his eyebrows. “What did you expect, something interesting?”

“Well, Missy Foreman-Greenwald is organizing it, so I thought she’d show a little more creativity.”

“Missy…” Nick chewed his bottom lip, thinking. Andrew tried not to stare. “She’s in my gym class. Isn’t she, like, a huge nerd?”

“The hugest. In terms of nerdiness, we are congruent in the volume of our hyperfixations.”

“I have no idea what that means, you absolute geek, and you know it.”

Andrew grinned. “It is fun to do, though.”

“Not that I would know,” Nick huffed, “because in terms of vocabulary I am apparently ‘amateur.’ Now if only I knew what that meant...”

Andrew stared at him. “Seriously?” he said, then promptly cried “Ow!” as Nick punched his shoulder.

“No!”

“Oh, that was-- that was a joke. Hey, that was funny!”

Nick put his head in his hands and sighed. “For someone so smart, you are sometimes so, so goddamn stupid.”

 

Thankfully, the drab gray walls of Bridgeton Middle School rose up in the distance to greet them. Maybe ‘greet’ wasn’t the right word for a building that had been there before they were born and probably would still be there a long time after.

Their middle school was like an old cheese- it got smellier the longer it was left to live, multicolored mold grew in its cracks, and adults vehemently insisted that it got better with age. Adults were so stupid. Andrew feared the time when the stability of childhood was torn from beneath his feet and he was left to wobble dangerously on a solidity of his future that resembled low-calorie, naturally flavored, reduced sugar Jell-O. With a shit ton of student loans.

Oh, wait. Puberty had already done that for him.

He said, puberty had already done that for him.

When Maury didn’t climb out of the next sewer they passed, Andrew mentally sighed in relief. Puberty (which was definitely a sentient being, he was sure of it but hesitated to think what form it would physically take) must have been giving him a break. His erection from before had finally gone down. Andrew would posit that it had been from the humiliation, but that certainly hadn’t stopped Maury from appearing before.

…

When Andrew’s vision refocused, he looked up only to find that he and Nick were already walking down the hallway to first period. That meant that he and Nick had already entered the school, sat in homeroom for ten minutes, heard the bell ring, and started heading for their next class. All without Andrew noticing.

Sometimes his own obliviousness scared him. What if he was missing something obvious because his life was on constant autopilot, something that would flip his life upside down and change it forever?

Nah. Andrew was too boring for anything like that to happen to him. The arrival of Maury was interesting, to be sure, but he had also said that everyone had a hormone monster. So it was one of those things that no one talked about, similar to America’s massive debt, the threat of nuclear weapons, or how the current president had possibly stayed in office for this long.

Actually, now that he was thinking about it, kudos to Nick for putting up with his airheaded ways all of the time. Or maybe Nick just chatted with other people while Andrew stared into space, lost in thought. That was probably it. Hopefully Nick fended off the questions about Andrew’s reclusive ways as well.

It would be nice, Andrew thought as he headed off to his history class, if being a hermit was still a viable career option. Not being obligated to talk to anyone, ever, sounded really great. Rooting for mushrooms in the woods and living in a hollowed out tree tree like that kid from that book didn’t sound that bad, either. Maybe Andrew should check out that book from the library. He could use the healthy food. Maybe its nutrients would travel to his digestive system by osmosis and he could continue his hobby of eating Flaming Hot Cheetos in his spare time.

“Hey, Andrew!” Missy greeted him and he put his backpack down and flopped into his assigned seat. Andrew had had a crush on her once, but it quickly disappeared once he found out that bisexuality was a thing and that the person he really wanted to like was  _ delante de sus narices.  _

That was Spanish for ‘right in front of his eyes.’ It actually meant ‘in front of one’s nostrils,’ but Spanish had a lot of strange turns of phrase, and if Andrew thought about complicated concepts like origins of common idioms he got a headache, and he already got enough frustration from the class alone.

Missy was... cute, in a geeky way. She was mulatto, with nappy black hair, braces, and an enthusiastic smile. She also had a habit of squealing when she got excited and had an (actually very serious) zero tolerance for sugar. She also read fanfiction and was passionate about ‘fandoms,’ ‘OTPs,’ and liked to discuss the relationship between ships and cannons that no one else understood or really cared about. But everyone had their flaws, and Andrew didn’t really judge.

“Hey,” he said, right as the fire alarm began to blare and everyone cheered and filed out of class. Andrew sighed as he put his coat back on. Back outside everyone went, and he generally preferred to, as they say, go with the flow, so back outside to the cold bitterness he go. (Whew, that would have been fun to say out loud.) Maybe he’d learn about some nature from the scenic view of the shriveled dandelions poking out of the cracked asphalt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments make my day, and kudos make the world go round.


	3. Life is Fire Drills

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Andrew converses with a strangely intelligent Missy. Merry Christmas, readers!  
> 12.25.18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Most of the major, important parts of the story have already been written, including this chapter (which I wrote a week before and just edited today). Now it's just a matter of filler scenes and minor arcs that I love to write.

Andrew did not end up learning anything about the environment. Instead, he ruminated upon the human nature.

Missy and Andrew were in the same homeroom. Their school was weird in the fact that it put students in homeroom alphabetically by last name. Andrew’s last name, Glouberman, was right next to both Missy’s last names: Foreman-Greenwald. There was no confusion in the administration over which homeroom to put Missy in; how convenient for them.

When the school ran a mandatory fire drill every month, students needed to go outside to a designated spot with the rest of their homeroom. Why didn’t the school organize fire drills so the rest of the class stayed together and wouldn’t have to scramble across the school grounds? Plot convenience.

Andrew was walking with Missy across the school grounds, tripping every so often on the frost dusted on the grass. Being tall was a curse.

“I’m going to tell you a joke now, but it’s going to start weirdly,” Missy told him, pulling on wool mittens that she pulled out of her coat, “so just be prepared.” Andrew, concentrating on not falling facedown in the dirt, nodded. That was the kind of relationship Andrew had with Missy. To be honest, it was refreshing.

“Alright,” said Missy, “so my huge fantasy crush is Nathan Fillion, so I always imagine him when I see those stupid relationship posts on feel-good sites like Pinterest and the inspirational section of Tumblr.”

“...Okay?”

“So imagine that it’s a normal day in adulthood, and you’re running to catch the subway at work. You’re in a hurry and you just make the train, jumping through the doors just as it starts to pull out. The train doors close, and you’re all out of breath and leaning over when the subway suddenly starts to move. Caught off-balance, you stumble and begin to fall! But--” Missy gasped dramatically, “your crush (in my case Nathan Fillion) swoops in and saves you.”

“Wha--?” Andrew started.

“Than the punchline occurs,” she interrupted him loudly. “You look up into the stranger’s eyes, and the stranger stares into your soul and says, ‘I think you just fell for me,’ and then the bus starts clapping.”

There was a brief silence between the two of them until Andrew’s sleep deprived brain processed whatever the hell Missy had just described. It was hard to jerk himself out of the fantasy, feeling Nick’s hands on his sweatshirt as he yanked Andrew up, looking up into his eyes and just seeing him there. There was also the fact that it was a killer pickup line, and he would probably die from heart failure as all the blood in his body flooded to his cheeks and also the nether and conveniently undescribed regions. Finally, Andrew collected his thoughts enough to say, “You have a very vivid internal life.”

“It’s much more interesting that way,” she said cheerfully.

“Tell me about it,” Andrew said, still trying to will down his goddamn erection. Down, boy. Nothing to see here.

He almost yelped when, all of a sudden, Missy rudely invaded his personal space and squinted into his eyes. “Do _you_ like anyone?” she abruptly said. Andrew hadn’t known before that eyes could actually pierce the soul.

Andrew had heard something about asking a question out of the blue in an attempt to get an answer out of a person that they’d rather not say. The book had compared it to skewering a fish with a stick-- if you were quick enough, you could catch it.

“Yes.”

Andrew mentally smacked himself, because the book was _All the King’s Men_ and he actively tried not to apply the books from the school curriculum to his personal life. Also because he had inadvertently answered Missy’s question, but that was secondary.

Missy didn’t fist pump, but it seemed as though she was visibly restraining herself. “Boy, right? You like a boy?”

“Um…” Andrew hadn’t come out to anyone yet besides his parents, and that only because they had somehow learned how to check search history and decided to infiltrate Andrew’s privacy. Andrew blamed the Internet for both cause and effect. But Missy seemed relatively trustworthy, or at the very least unlikely to make fun of his sexual orientation. “Yeah. My crush is a boy.”

“Goddamnit,” Missy said as she heaved a sigh.

Well, that was not the response Andrew expected. “Why?”

“There’s this girl in my Spanish class that said she’d like to get to know you better, because you seemed like a pretty cool guy. I hope hoping you could meet each other and bond, or whatever hip kids do these days. I’d personally be fine going to a roller rink because it’s a lot more intimate than seeing a movie, but you know what they say about mutual suffering...”

As Missy prattled on about society and exposure to senseless violence without losing the thread on the now one-sided conversation, he tuned her out for the sake of ruminating on his confusion.

Andrew? Andrew, a ‘pretty cool’ guy? Andrew was a loser, who in addition to never having received romantic and reciprocated love, was cursed to be homoerotically attracted to his best friend. And, in case someone ever got past the numerous emotional barriers he had studiously erected around himself, they would inevitably be driven away by his innate pervertedness. But Andrew believed that he was worthy of love.

At least, that’s what he tried to tell himself.

Missy’s tone suddenly went up, which meant that she had asked a question that Andrew had neither listened to or processed. He mentally shook himself like a dog in the rain. “I think I got all of that,” Andrew said, “but just to make sure… Can you say all of that again? I wasn’t listening.”

Ignoring the reference to the _Lego Movie_ because it was an obvious example of the desensitization of violence in the media, Missy repeated, “Are you ever going to tell Nick that you like him?”

And _that_ was the last time Andrew was ever zoning out of a conversation. What the fuck? How much could he had possibly missed by zoning out for fifteen seconds?

“H-how do you know that?”

Missy looked at him pityingly. “Oh, Andrew. I’m a fangirl. I can recognize hopeless pining when I see it, and can even fabricate situations where it exists although it obviously isn’t even there. So I need you to validate me that the mystery crush is in fact Nick, because I made a bet with myself that I would be embarrassed to lose.”

“N-no, you’re right about it being Nick,” Andrew said, shaken, “but how do you make a bet with yourself?”

“Andrew, you absolute idiot, you,” Missy sighed. “Oh, well. You’ll figure it out eventually. What are you going to do in the meantime?”

“In the meantime? As in what happens if Nick figures out I like him?”

“Yeah, are you going to tell him the truth?”

Andrew stared at her as if she had grown a second head. “Obviously not. I’m going to tell him a complete lie. Are you crazy? What do you think we’re in, a love story?”

Missy sighed forlornly. “That’d be nice. But love stories can be bland, and I don’t think our lives are uninteresting enough.”

“Maybe it’ll be an action story.”

“High fantasy!”

“Adventure!”

“Horror!”

“No!” Andrew looked at her, horrified. “Bad things happen to the characters in the horror genre! We’re just tiny seventh graders. The worst thing that should happen to us is something embarrassing at the school dance.”

“Sounds an awful lot like foreshadowing,” Missy shrugged, “but who knows! Maybe our lives will continue to be relatively boring, or they’ll get exciting sometime in the near future. But I’ve learned to just take each moment as it comes. Sometimes, the exposition is a necessary prerequisite as a story.”

“What do you mean?”

Missy tapped her chin, considering. “Even when the intended audience is already familiar with the characters, sometimes it’s preferable to introduce the cast again. Sometimes the characters have changed, or maybe it’s just a matter of style of perspective. Most of the original content, especially in new media, haven’t had the opportunity to flesh out the characters as well as they could have. It’s an opportunity to get familiar with the material, both for the creators and those who build upon it.” She looked up brightly. “But what do I know? Maybe authors just like to fuck around with the characters and get back in the swing of writing. Ce la vie. Onward with life. Onward, I say!”

“But what did all that have to do with Nathan Fillion?” Andrew asked, his hands on either side of his body to adjust his center of gravity, because even though the gag of him being clumsy was getting old, the slippery frost was not.

“Absolutely nothing!” Missy chirped. “But wouldn’t it be funny if your crush caught you on the subway someday and floored you with a pickup line? I think I’d die if Nathan Fillion caught me.”

If his crush did try to catch him, Andrew thought, Andrew would probably squish him and then they’d both fall. Fall for each other, hopefully. Hey, that’d be a good title for those stupid fanfictions that Missy liked. Suddenly all of the writing shtick she was spouting made a bit more sense. Maybe someday he’d guess her pseud, which was a secret that she guarded with her life.

Missy suddenly saw one of her nerd friends and jumped in the air, waving frantically to get their attention. “Hey! Hey, Erica, over here!” She glanced over at Andrew. “Oh, sorry Andrew, I’m going to leave you now. I haven’t seen her in ages, and by ages I mean since I got to school. It’s nothing against you, but bye!”

After that frenzied monologue, she rushed towards her friend, screaming, “Erica! It’s been ages! Centuries! Hours! Minutes!”

Andrew shook his head fondly as he watched Missy interact with her friend from a distance, gesticulating wildly. She really was the definition of adorkable.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's already over 15k and I've only written like 6 scenes. Whoops. I'll be writing a lot more this week since it's my winter break, but the next chapter might not be posted because I don't write scenes in chronological order.  
> Side note: I noticed that the only works for this fandom are a) smut, b) Jay/Matthew, and c) Judd Birch. C'mon, guys.
> 
> Comments make my day, and kudos make the world go round.


	4. Life is Unexplainable Situations

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I forgot that if I posted chapters I couldn't unpost them, so have two successive chapters.   
> The story has been completely written. It hasn't been edited because I ran out of time procrastinating on my other schoolwork. It probably won't be edited, so sorry for the typos.  
> I've decided to publish a chapter every Friday. Chapter 5 (already posted) will serve as this Friday's update. I gifted you Chapter 4 today because I wrote my first ever fanfiction last year, right before midnight.  
> Happy new year. May this year be even better than the last.  
> 12.31.18

After a couple of seconds of staring in space, Andrew sadly realized that he was alone in a field of socializing teenagers. The unfortunate side effect of not wanting any friends was sometimes needing them.

Andrew stood awkwardly on the field, the dew on the grass slowly but surely soaking his socks through his shoes. He wished for pockets, at the very least he could stop standing there with his hands at his sides. The discomfort of having nothing to do with them had his fingers twitching slightly, fingering the seams on his jeans. 

Truely, he didn’t mind being alone. But standing there on the field, he could feel everyone's eyes on him. Surely, if they bothered to give Andre the time of day, they would be thinking something along the lines of, “Oh, Andrew, that kid? He's such a loser, standing there all by himself. Look, he doesn’t have anyone to talk to. How sad.” 

Surely they would think less of him if they saw him standing all by himself-- that’s what he thought whenever he saw a kid by himself. Andrew didn't even have his phone with him as a distraction from the awkwardness.

Then the clouds parted, and he saw Jessi Glaser. To his eyes, she looked like an island of salvation. A life jacket in his ocean of isolation.

Jessi stood there on the grass too, also alone. Well, maybe she was alone, and she’d like to not be lonely together. She was Nick’s ex, one of his experiments in the past year. Nick said that it was just a mutual practice in tonsil hockey for the both of them, because he was just cool enough to do that.

Andrew, for his own part, didn’t think much of anything of Jessie simply because he didn’t know her that well, although he had heard rumors of her shoplifting from the local convenience store. Jessi and him had a few mutual friends in common, but mainly Nick. And since Nick was the epicenter of Andrew’s life at the moment, he might as well get acquainted with her.

That all went through Andrew’s head as he approached Jessi. She was standing off to the side, on her phone, typing a message to someone. 

Andrew approached and greeted her with a casual, “Hey.”

Jessi looked up. “Hi.” Andrew couldn’t tell if her

The conversation fell flat.

The conversation died, and Andrew didn’t try to revive it. What was the point of beating a dead horse?

Jessi, for some reason, didn't like Andrew. That was okay. He wasn’t entitled to universal likeability, and he accepted that. It just sucked being rejected. Andrew would have asked Jessi what her problem was, but he couldn’t find the courage nor the will to do it. It was easier to sit passively by and do nothing.

Confrontation was scary, and Andrew wasn’t invested enough in him and Jessie's potential friendship to bother.

But who knew? Andrew occasionally said things that he instantly regretted, or worse, things that he didn’t know were the wrong thing to say. There was also the possibility of his accidentally offending her in some way, but Andrew had a slight problem where his memory of past events was disturbingly vague. Sure, he wanted to forget middle school as soon as possible and also forget every time he publicly humiliated himself, but he’d like to at least remember if someone in his extended friend group was a kleptomaniac and, more importantly, if he said something about it in front on her.

It annoyed him, though, what Jessi did sometimes. When he and Nick walked to lunch together, she would sometimes join them, While walking through the hallway, Jessi would always walk on the opposite side of Nick so that Andrew was never in the middle. She never spoke to him, and went on her phone when Andrew occasionally contributed something to the conversation. If Andrew asked her a direct question, she would answer in one word responses.

Jessi was never openly rude. But it was what she didn’t say that stung.

He scrutinized Jessi now, shivering in his green hoodie. Jessi who had been typing furiously on her phone for a couple of seconds, suddenly looked to the side as one of her friends appeared. 

So that's why Andrew felt like completely shit after that failed conversation. Because now he had proof, definite proof that it was him that Jessi hated. He felt a lump form in his throat. No. He was not going to just because some person didn’t want to talk to them.

Andrew wanted to cut himself off from toxic people like this, but the problem was that he didn’t have the confidence or social skills to walk up to someone new and begin a conversation. That was more Nick’s thing, and Andrew depended on Nick to make friends for both of them.

It was kind of unfair. Everybody had already made friends in their childhood, and when they got jumbled together in middle school their friend group mushed together. No one had to go up to a complete stranger and talk to them, because everyone always had a buddy to do it with them.

Was something wrong with him? He seemed like the only person in his school without a group of friends. It was possible that there was really something wrong with him, or his character, or his personality. But Andrew didn’t want to change his entire identity. The majority of it could be replaced, and that was fine. But he still wanted to be himself-- just a cooler, newer version of him. He wished that someone could advise him on how to do that, because it hurt.

It hurt when he genuinely tried to make friends and people rejected him. Maybe it was a part of life, and other people had the same sort of problems that he did. But it still hurt. It hurt a lot, and Andrew didn’t know how to fix it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story is going to get a lot darker, so I need to include scenes of Andrew’s life going steadily downhill. I didn’t have any ideas from the show, so I just used something from my personal life that's been bothering me. Isn’t that just a little bit sad?


	5. Life is Dodgeball

“I wanna be a comedian,” Andrew said out of nowhere. He and Nick were standing near the bleachers in the school gym, clad in the school issued shirts and pants. It was approximately nine in the goddamn morning, and for the life of his Andrew had no idea why anyone would think that a) gym class was a good idea and b) having that gym class before anyone truly woke up was an even better one.

Half of the kids were standing in small groups and socializing, as normal people did, and the other half was falling asleep on the bleachers. He wished he was joking. One of the kids had brought a pillow and had curled up and closed his eyes. Sweet dreams, random senior who no longer gave a shit about anything. Sweet dreams.

Nick was one of those people who looked like he was about join the senior on the bench and use Andrew as a pillow, so Andrew snapped his fingers in front of Nick’s face and repeated what he said.

“Same,” Nick shook his hair out of his eyes in a futile attempts to wake up. “No, I mean literally same. Being a comedian was  _ my  _ dream job, Andrew.” He got on his knees dramatically. “Please,” he begged, doing a relative approximation of a Russian peasant’s accent, “you’ve taken my chillens, my home, my family. Please, sir, don’t take mah dream.”

“‘Mah dream’? I think you just switched accents there.”

“No one has to know…” Nick whined. “You could at least pretend that I have a chance in my future career of voice acting.”

“Oh,” said Andrew, relieved. “I want to be a stand-up comedian.”

“That’s good, because I want to do voice acting. Oh, and also improv. That’s a lot of fun to do.” Nick rose from the floor dramatically, raising his arm in the air and pretending to hold the skull from Hamlet. “Look, it’s my future Oscar.” He turned his wrist, admiring empty air. “See how it catches the light?”

“I like improv too!” Andrew grumbled, betrayed.

Nick grabbed Andrew’s gym shirt way too dramatically for someone who still had bed-head. “Why must you take everything I love?” 

“Because,” Andrew said, “you refuse to give me consistent acting. Directors want a steady, reliable show. They don’t want their lead actor suddenly doing a tap dance number from  _ Newsies  _ when they’re supposed to be giving a solemn eulogy concerning his mother and a free churro. _ ” _

“Psh, who cares about consistency? No consistency in improv! Check out my--” Nick’s voice went down low, real low, and gravely, “ _ voices.”  _

Andrew stared at him. “Woah. Where’s that voice come from?” It sounded familiar, somehow. It almost sounded like--

‘Maury,’ Andrew thought, ‘why does Nick have your voice?’

Maury helpfully appeared. “Yes, that is, in fact, my voice. Your hormone monster takes the tone of the people closest to you. It--” he spread his hands, sounding as if he was quoting something, “‘aids you on the wonderful road of puberty.’”

‘Really?’ Andrew asked, intrigued.

“Nah, kid. I have no fucking clue.”

Andrew waved a hand at him. ‘Unhelpful, as always. Bye.’

Maury dove headfirst into the nearest trash can and disappeared. Good riddance, Andrew thought.

“I heard that,” came from the trash can. Andrew smacked his forehead with his palm as time reverted back to its normal speed.

Nick grinned at him. “Are you facepalming because my voices are so  _ awesome?”  _

The whistle tweeted shrilly, simultaneously saving Andrew from having to answer yet condemning him to fifty minutes of hell.

Andrew was, in seven words, unathletic to the point of physical concern. To be fair, his sports mind was fine. He thought his mind had gotten the basics about learning to dribble a basketball down just fine-- it was his body that had difficulty with following through with it. The other kids in his grade learned, very quickly, not to pick Andrew to be on their team, and he was absolutely fine with that. Leave the physical activity to the guys for whom it was impossible to somehow fall  _ up _ the stairs.

“Alright, kids!” Coach Steve yelled. Coach Steve was… different. Andrew could spend two thousand words describing Couch Steve and his various quirks and misadventures, but he was fairly sure that the readers already knew most of his shtick. Also, he was a bit of an undeveloped character, and scenes with him got boring rather quickly. But that was completely off-topic.

“Today,” Coach Steve hollered, “we’re doing an activity that a lot of you might now. It involves foam, evil, and pain, and I completely forget it’s name and what the point of it is!”

“Is its objective to,” said a random popular asshole, “ _ dodge?” _

Inside Andrew’s head, sirens started blaring. No. His worst enemy--

“Oh, yeah!” Coach Steve waved his hands around happily. “Dodgeball!”

The room was full of mixed reactions. The athletic kids cheered, hopeful that they’d get a crack at giving people that they hated concussions. The nerds resignedly folded up their glasses in anticipation and placed them and the bleachers. Andrew would have done the same, but he was blind without them. Then again, maybe he’d have better chances of dodging a missile without them. One girl fainted on the floor, and her friends lunged forward to catch her. Truly, the class of physical education was a prime time example of Darwinism. 

Survival of the fittest. Sometimes, Andrew wished that he’d worked out once in his life. Who knows, maybe it’d help him. Then again, he still remembered the incredible agony from when he tried to do a single pushup for his fitness test, so maybe if he wasn't as eager to do more of them then that was expected.

“Ready, kids?” Coach Steve said, happily condemning half the class to their early deaths. A few students crossed themselves. Jessi Glaser cracked her knuckles, leering at them from the opposite team. Missy covered her eyes and whimpered.

A shrill whistle blew, and all hell broke loose. The braver kids sprinted up the the middle line where the balls were lined up, nabbed them, and wound up in an attempt to fatally wound as many people on the other team as possible. Everyone else who were not interested in an early death scattered as if the Seven Deadly Sins had personified and were chasing them.

A torrent of projectiles took flight as bullies arose from their brain dead state to flex their muscles and bring their arms back in the beginning of a throw. Foam balls whizzed through the air, whistling as they passed by, and hitting the opposite walls with a deadly  _ smack.  _

Andrew cowered behind a relatively tall and freckled nerd in his Spanish class with curly hair. “Oh my god,” he half-whispered, half-shouted shouted to Nick over the ominous thudding of the dodgeballs slamming against the padded walls in the background. The sole clock in the gym was caged over in metal bars as thick as his pinky finger. If the school administration needed solid iron to preserve an essential timepiece in the gymnasium, what would they care about Andrew, an inessential and out of shape geek? “This is how I'm going to die.”

“Don't be an idiot, Andrew,” the bespectacled nerd girl said, turning her head to the side so Andrew could hear her words clearly. “If anything’s going to kill you, it’s going to be in a much worse situation than this.”

“What’s your name?” Andrew asked her. If she was going to give him ominous life advice, he might as well know who it was coming from.

The nerd looked hurt. “You don’t know me? We suffer together in Spanish class. I thought the class was bonded through our mutual desperation.”

This random, strange girl. Andrew liked her.

She looked forward again, staring steadfastly across the gym at the opposing team, and suddenly time slowed down, and Andrew felt his heartbeat slow.  _ Th-thump. _ Across the gym, a ripped jock wound up to heave a ball, muscles rippling through his tee. The ball flew sluggishly across the gym, rotating slowly as the whistling sound as it sliced through the air spread over an eternity. It was headed directly at her and Andrew tried to open his mouth in time, desperate to yell something, anything, a warning for what was to come.  _ Th-thump. _

The mystery girl looked straight at the ball speeding towards her, stoic and unflinching. Then, leisurely, she put up her hand up in front of her, palm facing the opposite side of the gymnasium as if she were blasting something out of the air with her mind. As her lashes fluttered shut, she steeled herself, but her expression remained as porcelain plasticity.  _ Th-thump. _

Then, as the flight of the ball was almost at its ench, inches from hitting her, time quickly resumed its normal pace. The ball smacked into the palm of her hand, falling harmlessly to the ground and bouncing away. The  _ smack  _ of a combination of rubber and foam hitting flesh resounded around the gymnasium. The girl didn’t even flinch. 

That was, without a doubt, the most badass thing Andrew had ever seen.

“Welp,” she said flatly, “guess I’m out. What a shame. Guess I’ll go sit on the other team’s prison side, pretend to watch the rest of the game, and passively wait the class to be over. Bye, Andrew.” Then she padded to the side of the gym, away from the torrent of flying foam, and slouched over to the ‘prison.’

As Mystery Girl (Andrew realized that he still didn’t know her name, but she knew his) walked off the gym floor, shaking her hand slightly and puffing air on it to dissipate the sting of the blow, Andrew realized that there was no reaction from the rest of the school whatsoever. No one clapped or cheered. There were no hoots or hollers for that astounding physical achievement. 

Andrew couldn’t believe his eyes and ears. More specifically, he wondered why the girl didn’t catch the ball, since she obviously had the capability to do so. Maybe she chose to passively float her way through life. Maybe she was good at choosing her battles.

Or maybe she really  _ was  _ caught off guard. Maybe it was entropy. Maybe it’s Maybelline.

Or maybe, possibly, it was because the girl didn’t want the attention. Maybe staying in the background and being able to do superhuman feats without any recognition whatsoever was her shtick. 

Andrew was a certifiable idiot, so he dismissed the thought.

“Heads up,” Nick said suddenly.

“Wait,” Andrew started, “wha--?”

A whizzing ball walloped Andrew squarely on the side of his face with the force and ferocity of a well-packed punch. Screw it, getting blasted with that goddamn piece of foam was similar to being hit by a speeding train. He could hyperbolize his misfortune. That son of a bitch  _ hurt. _

The force of it had him reeling. His glasses flew off his face and hopefully landed somewhere near him, because it would be a bitch to have to try to find them again. Andrew’s head throbbed painfully and his vision flickered with black and white spots, so it was no surprise to him when he crashed on the polished hardwood and lay there prostrate and unmoving. He closed his eyes, both from pain and humiliation. 

The Mystery Girl, still in prison, winced in the background.

“Ow, holy shit.” Andrew clutched the side of his face, which ultimately felt like someone had poured gasoline and happily held a lit match to it. “That hurts like a motherfucker.”

Coach Steve yelled to him through a neon orange traffic cone so it amplified his voice. “Did I hear you say a naughty word, random pudgy kid?”

Still in incredible pain, Andrew blearily looked up. Since when Coach Steve have a fucking megaphone? Now he could broadcast his stupidity over a greater radius. He clutched his temples, his head swimming.

Did Andrew have a concussion? His head throbbed in response. Yeah, he definitely had a concussion.

\-------------

Five minutes later in the nurse’s office, the woman on duty took the thermometer out of Andrew’s mouth. Internally, Andrew hoped that he really did have a concussion. It would make a good story, something to laugh over when he was older and less inclined to be coerced into hellish physical activities. Also, it would be incredibly embarrassing if he felt like he had been lit on fire, dropped off a plane in the stratosphere, and flattened by a steamroller, only to have nothing result of it.

“I have good news,” the news said tonelessly, wiping the thermometer with a sanitary wipe. “You don’t have a concussion.”

“Motherfucker!”

\-------------

One detention slip and an ice pack later, Andrew walked down the hallway with Nick to their next class, because life went on no matter what.

Nick laughed at him as Andrew related his excursion to the nurse. “But,” he said, conciliatory, “I bet that you’ll have a nasty bruise!”

Andrew shot him a nasty look which he predicted was going to be just as disgusting as his face tomorrow.


	6. Life is Lunch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spaghetti and John Mulaney  
> Current song I'm obsessed with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5wHdUT2a_s

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a pretty short chapter. It's probs my least favorite b/c it's the very last one that I wrote (I was like oh shit I forgot to introduce the dance and you can see that rip) and I was kinda done w/ this story by then.  
> However, the next chapter is 4.5k words and the story's plot truly begins then.

It was lunchtime, and Andrew fought and shoved his way into the cafeteria in a futile effort to cut in front of the lunch line. The cafeteria rumbled with a noise that only crowds could create, a dull roar in the background, punctuating with occasional laughter.

Andrew stood in line on his phone, grabbed a tray, and tried not to crinkle his nose at the unidentifiable goop that the lunch ladies generously called ‘spaghetti.’ Then he crossed over the cafeteria to get to his usual table, where he, Nick, and Nick’s friends sat together.

As he mourned the severe social anxiety he got from walking alone in a crowd, he tried to avoid the judging gazes of everyone around him by lowering his eyes and sitting down quietly.

There was a fast-paced conversation going, one that went incredibly quickly without making much sense. Trying to jump onto it was similar to trying to jump onto a moving train.

Jay was explaining his relationship with his pillow, and everyone was justifiably attacking him. “You guys, the pillow is totally real! We fucked! It was consensual and totally age appropriate!”

“Age appropriate in comparison to you, or the pillow?” Matthew asked him. Oh, hello. Andrew had completely forgotten that he existed.

“Well, I’m forty, so I don’t think it matters either way.”

Matthew sputtered incoherently as Andrew suppressed an aneurysm. Where had Jay even gotten that idea?

(Now I insert an Author’s Note, because I can’t help myself. I did a bit of research, and apparently John Mulaney had revealed that in his sexual fantasies, when he was younger, he was forty years old and rich. I think the Youtube Video is called “Big Mouth in Conversation” and it’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.)

“Not all of us fuck our pillows, Jay.” Nick told him, waving a school-issued french fry. “Sometimes we plebeians need to use our right hand.”

“I’m a lefty,” Caleb said.

“Did you appear out of nowhere just to say that?” Jay snapped at him.

“He’s literally sitting at our table,” Andrew said, which was the first real thing he had contributed to the conversation.

“Oh, you’re a real comedian, aren’t you, Andrew?” Jay sneered.

Andrew flashed back to gym class and unconsciously touched his cheek. “Actually, I’d like to do be.”

“Nick’s a comedian,” Gina said, evilly smiling. “Remember when I got boobs and he pulled that stunt on me where he said, ‘Let’s be boyfriend and girlfriend or get out of my life?’”

Nick’s face was red and there was an audible noise as he ground his teeth in embarrassment.

Caleb pointed to his chart of expressions and helpfully said, “Furious.”

“Thanks, Caleb,” Andrew said as Missy yelled, “Run, Gina!”

Gina held up her lunch tray to block the storm of french fries chucked by Nick at her. “No, Missi, you got me into this, you get me out!”

Missy raised her fist in the air. “You can’t tell me what to do! I’m a proud Asian American woman!”

“You are African American, Missy!” Nick cried.

“Shut up!” Jessi told him. “She can be whatever she wants.”

“Feminism!” Missy said as she high-fived her. Gina extended a closed fist from behind her lunch tray shield and Missy fist-bumped her as well.

Andrew put his head in his hands and groaned. “Why do people have to be so stupid?” 

Matthew patted his shoulder in sympathy.

“I’m not stupid-- I just don’t sleep,” Missy said. “It’s what all the cool kids are doing.”

“You were never cool,” Gina told her.

“... So it’s better.”

“John Mulaney!” said Nick, fist-pumping. Andrew though back to the conversation. Surely that wasn’t the only John Mulaney reference that had happened until that particular moment.

“If all your friends know John Mulaney,” Andrew said, turning to Nick, “then I approve.”

“‘Your friends?’”

Oops. Andrew had forgotten that Nick didn’t know that Andrew thought of all of their friend group as solely Nick’s friends, because that was the truth. Luckily, he was interrupted by Missy’s squealing.

“When I write my stories,” Missy started again, and Jay interrupted her to sneer, “Yeah, fanfiction about Nathan Fillion!”

“Yes, thanks, Jay. You guys, I just realized something.” Missy’s eyes comically widened. “The trick with writing characters is that you have to write a character who appeals to the audience. Deep down, the character  _ must _ be a good person. If they're not a good person, they have to be actively trying to be one. Otherwise, the readers will quickly lose sympathy for them.

“This happened to me when I watched  _ BoJack Horseman.” _

“Isn’t that the animated television show on Netflix for furries?” Gina said, and Nick lightly punched her on the shoulder, having run out of french fry projectiles a while back.

Missy continued with her rant, acting as if no one had spoken. “BoJack is indisputably a bad person. He does bad stuff and bad stuff happens to him, and people say that he needs to be better. BoJack says he will, but he never does-- and eventually I lost most of my sympathy for him. 

“I don't know why the creators didn’t give him character growth. Maybe it's because they didn’t think he needed an arc, or maybe they just need to extend the show for as long as possible because capitalism. In any event, the audience loses sympathy for him because he only bemoans his fate instead of trying to change it.

“Maybe this will appeal to some people. But it was a huge turn off for me.”

“Um…” Jay said. “I think I speak for all of us when I ask what the fuck that was about.”

Missy looked at her sandwich, embarrassed at accidently having revealed such a huge part of her philosophy. “I don’t know.... It’s just something I was thinking about, I guess. I think it could be applied to real life and you guys could use it.”

“That sounds slightly offensive,” Jessi told her.

“N-no,” Missi colored, “you know what, forget I said anything, sorry.”

At the end of lunch, when everyone was filing away to their next class, Andrew caught up with Missy. “I thought that was insightful, what you said. It really resonated with me, the stuff about being a good person, because sometimes, I want to improve, and it feels like that. Sometimes.” He caught Missy’s calculating expression and halted. “Was that too weird? I can’t read social cues.”

“No, it was interesting,” Missy said. “Thanks for telling me.” Then she walked away, yelling over her shoulder, “See you at the dance, right?”

Andrew had been blissfully unaware of the dance that would occur tomorrow night. It was a school dance, which meant that his mother would force him to go. He had been looking forward to reading his book, but the weather forecast of the future informed him that that probably wouldn’t be happening. He nodded resignedly. “... Right.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just wanted to note that out of everything I've written, I've liked writing this story the most. This fic is the one I actually fist-pump whenever I get a (relatively rare, compared to the other fandom I write for) kudos or comment, so I guess it's the underdog, just like the actual show.  
> And I _always_ root for the underdog.
> 
> Comments make my day, and kudos make the world go round.


	7. Life is Frottage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Q: The dance! Nothing goes wrong!! Why would it???

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A: b/c I'm the author, that's why.

It was the day of the dance. Everything had been relatively uneventful up until then and would hopefully continue to be so.

Andrew entered the gymnasium and was overwhelmed almost immediately. The middle school dances were always held in the high school gym, but who knew why, as the middle school had one. It was just as well, though, because Andrew really didn’t feel the need to relive his humiliation.

The gym was dark and uncomfortably hot. Multicolored lights flashed repetitively, illuminating silhouettes moving against the background. Why did people like coming to these sorts of things, again?

Oh, probably because most people were capable of having multiple friends and having fun with them.

Andrew had come alone, promising to meet Nick he got there but unwisely not specifying the time and location.

This was too stressful. Andrew went outside to get some punch, which was most likely spiked by Jay or some other idiot. Maybe he’d see someone he knew there.

Why did he hate school dances with a burning passion? Hm. He could write an essay on it if he had the time.

He disliked dancing, first of all, because he was uncoordinated and he always felt self-conscious. The girls looked just as uncomfortable as the boys did, but they had their own little groups, and people didn’t judge them as much because _society._ It was strange, because Andrew always felt incredibly awkward at first, but when he warmed up he became a slightly better dancing-- or a more enthusiastic one.

His dear mother liked to call him stiff; stiff in movement, in speech, in manner. This probably translated to his dancing.

Secondly, Andrew’s social anxiety meant that he was terrified of social situations, and more importantly, because alone in them. He just couldn’t handle it. It seemed like everyone was _looking_ at him and judging him for what a loser he was, that he couldn’t even find one person to be with.

Everyone else in the world had some kind of arm candy, it seemed, except for Andrew.

This did not mean that Andrew disliked fun. It just meant that he’d be significantly more comfortable in a one-on-one situation, or maybe just a book. Reading meant that he lived vicariously through others.

He reached the punch bowl, poured himself a cup, sipped, and tried not to instantly spit it out when the bitter tang of strong alcohol burned his tongue. Goddamn you, Jay.

It was at that instant that Nick decided to show up. “Andrew! I was looking for you?” He saw Andrew’s screwed up face. “You sampled the punch, didn’t you?” Andrew nodded sadly. “I thought we swore a pact to only brave Jay’s various concoctions together.”

Andrew shrugged in a _What can you do?_ gesture. He really hoped Nick would stop talking soon, because he’d really like to spit out the foul tasting drink as soon as humanly possible.

Nick caught on. “Oh, my God, spit it out, Andrew! I mean, like, do it discreetly, but Jesus Christ, sorry.”

Andrew did, and then started up a conversation with Nick outside the gym doors because he hadn’t worked up the courage to go back in.

“I’m going to monologue,” Andrew said dramatically.

“Go ahead,” Nick spread his hands. “I’ve got nothing better to do. I’m all ears.”

“You know what’s weird about me? I can never tell what people are saying. Not like, metaphorically. I mean that I can’t make out the words of things that people say to me. Any I thought about it for a while, because no one else seems to have trouble comprehending the verbal speech of the English language at the basic level.

“Or does nobody talk about it? Is it just me?”

Nick shrugged.

“I finally came to a conclusion,” Andrew said, “and it’s based off of two reasons. The first is that I’m always slightly detached from reality and if I’m not directly tuned into the conversation then I miss what is being said. The second reason is most likely the main reason, and probably the stupidest. You know how I don’t like to watch movies without subtitles?”

Nick nodded emphatically. “Yeah, and it’s so damningly annoying.”

“It’s because I can’t tell what they’re saying otherwise. I also hate people and never talk to anyone, and additionally you know that I read a lot.

“My groundbreaking theory is that because I never am exposed to people speaking without the physically written words that they are saying, my mental speech to text capabilities, if you will, and underperforming and inefficient. And that is why I need you to repeat what you say a few times. It’s not because I’m deaf-- it’s because I’m antisocial. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

Nick looked like he was about to cry as he adjusted his tie. “Andrew, you’re so goddamn stupid and I love you. Thank you for monologuing, and I give you permission to do it whenever you like.”

“Want to go inside?” Andrew said as a peace offer. His pride wasn’t hurt, because Nick valued his opinions, even the stupid ones.

“Let’s go.”

They both made their way inside the gym, blinking in the lights and dodging the masses of middle schoolers dancing. After throwing their shoes on the side of their gym, they spotted Nick’s friend group dancing near their general vicinity and, after a pleading look from Nick and Andrew’s grundig nod of assent, slid to them in their socked feet.

Everyone greeted each other in the boring way that all small talk goes. Andrew danced for a while with them, and it was awkward for him just like always, but it was okay since it was nothing new. He resisted to take out his phone to check the time for a while, but eventually gave in, slid out of the circle of dancing friends, and went on Snapchat.

He got Snapchat not to fit in with social norms, but rather to see what the filters were all about. The only times he used it were to keep up the streaks with his Internet friends and to stalk people’s stories, as he was doing now out of lack of anything better to do.

As Andrew looked at the Snapchat stories of some of the honest to God popular kids in his contacts, he couldn't help thinking they were so different from him that they might as well be aliens. Hell, he couldn’t even remember why he mutually friended the popular kids in the first place. Maybe they had asked him for homework help at one point.

But they had all of the prom pictures, their sleek low cut dresses and their shiny smile, and videos of the flashing lights and smiling faces and shouting and _fun._

Was this fake? Andrew wondered, genuinely wondered. Was everyone putting on a show, or were they as happy as their Instagram accounts said they were.

Obviously it was fake to an extent, but he’d have like to know the specifics.

Just then, a slow dance started playing in the background. Andrew looked around worriedly. The friend group had since scattered, and Andrew had no idea how long he’d been standing there, ruminating on his phone. His gal pals Gina and Missy were nowhere to be found, and the last thing he wanted to do was seem like even more of a loser in front of Nick. On second thought, Nick already knew how much of an antisocial nerd Andrew really was, but he didn't want to think about that right now.

The point was that he was standing there alone and awkward as everyone around him started coupling up at a frightening rate. He could see the bitch Brittaney from his history class already doing some heavy petting with some guy who he didn't recognize. At this point the person could have been anywhere from a high schooler to a seventh grader that sat beside him in the cafeteria, which demonstrated exactly how disconnected Andrew was from the outside world, except his direct interactions. And-- wait, was that Matthew and Jay? Were they _holding hands?_

Middle schoolers were like hyenas, in that they would kick you out of the pack and throw you to the wolves of social martyrdom without a second thought. So it was no surprise that Andrew started to sweat. What would happen if he sunk lower than he already was? He had though he had already hit the low, but as he stumbled through life he was rapidly discovering that everything could always somehow become worse.

Nick stuck his hands in his pockets. “Do you want to dance?”

In Andrew's head, the world stopped as it magically did a freeze-frame scratch. What?

Okay, it was time for Andrew to retreat to his mind palace to assess the situation. Nick Birch was and had been his friend since approximately diapers. He had previously shown zero romantic affection towards Andrew, not that Andrew had given him much opportunity to do so.

Andrew was what people called a low-maintenance friend. He was content to have a friendly relationship where he and another person talk at school with absolutely no further interaction or intrusion into their personal life.

The thing about Andrew is that he was fine being alone. He was almost never lonely. He had a few friends in his social circle and that was enough for him. Quality over quantity is what Andrew really valued-- was it his fault that most of the teenagers in his school were absolute idiots?

His parents called Andrew selfish and self-centered, which was basically the same thing. Andrew called it convenient.

Back to the mind palace. It was now established that Nick had never shown physical or emotional affection in a romantic manner. Point two: as far as Andrew knew, Nick was steadfastly heterosexual.

“Andrew.” Nick snapped his fingers in front of Andrew's face, distracting Andrew from his vision of him in a puffy pink dress waving a flag with a smile on his face.

“Wha?” Andrew, for his part, had a severe yet temporary condition called Bisexual Distress. For the most part, the disease remained dormant, this evidently wasn't one of those times.

“I said, do you want to dance? Everyone else is already is twos, and we look awkward just standing around.”

Andrew felt as if his hope had been pricked with a needle. So Nick wasn't doing this for personal reasons. That was fine. This situation was fine. Andrew was fine, fine, fine.

“Sure, I mean-- I guess. Uh, but only if you want to…”

“I want to,” said Nick, taking his hands out of his pockets and putting them on Andrew's waist.

Andrew made a noise halfway between a gasp and a choke. “How very forward of you.”

“Oh, grow up. This is the twenty first century. Two boys can dance with each other without people judging.”

“No, I m-meant, uh, I mean--”

“I was joking.” Nick smiled at him nervously. “Andrew, are you okay? We can stop of you want--”

“No!” Andrew yelped, then cleared his throat. “I mean, no. Let's do this.”

Nick's hand on his waist were small and warm.

As Andrew liked to say, middle schoolers were the meanest people in the world. They would make fun of you, but in an accurate way. They’ll be like, ‘Ha, look at that high-waisted weird nerd. He got feminine hips.’ And I’m like, ‘No! That’s the thing I’m sensitive about!’

(Andrew still got war flashbacks from gym class.)

So Nick put his baby hands on Andrew’s feminine hips, and they swayed gently together the song continued playing.

They danced for a while, quietly. It didn’t feel awkward. It felt… nice.

Maury appeared next to him for no reason at all. “Let’s get a little friction going,” he said wickely, and pushed Andrew’s hips closer to Nick’s.

Okay, that was a dick move on Maury’s part.

“Bisexuality,” Maury told him, “twice the sex!”

“More like twice the unfuckability,” Andrew grumbled.

Nick mistook the gesture and sidled up _way_ too close to Andrew so their bodies were pressed up against each other. Was this gay?

The song changed to something more upbeat. Andrew recognized it, just because it was a song by an old emo band and Andrew was now going through his angsty teenage years.

_“Oh na na na na na na na na_

_I never really feel a thing_

_I'm just kinda too froze_

_You were the only one_

_That even kinda came close.”_

Nick recognized the song. “Hey, isn’t this the song you’re obsessed with?”

“Anything by Panic! at the Disco is a song that I’m obsessed with,” Andrew corrected him. “But yes. _Hold Me Tight or Don’t_ is the song I’m _currently_ obsessed with.”

Nick took a hand off of Andrew’s waist to fist pump. “Knew it.”

Andrew involuntarily gasped, very quietly because Maury covered his mouth to muffle it. When Nick had moved, Andrew’s crotch had felt some unexpected… friction. Cap’n, we are experiencing some technical difficulties and turbulence. Please stand by.

No. No. No. This was very bad, because it felt so good.

_“I just pinch myself_

_No longer comatose_

_I woke up, no luck_

_I woke up, no luck.”_

Unconsciously, Andrew ground his hips, just a little bit. His eyes closed, before they snapped open. What the fuck was he doing?

_“And when your stitch comes loose_

_I wanna sleep on every piece of fuzz_

_And stuffing that comes out of you, you_

_I took too many hits off this memory_

_I need to come down.”_

He needed to come down. It had been too long since he last got off, and this was the consequence of his insatiable libido. Also, this was now definitely gay.

_“An-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-nother day goes by_

_So hold me tight_

_Hold me tight, or don't_

_Oh n-n-no, no this isn't how our story ends_

_So hold me tight_

_Hold me tight, or don't.”_

Andrew didn’t care. The dance floor was packed, and it wasn’t like anybody could see them. Everyone was too busy throwing their hands up and jumping to notice anyone else other than those in their immediate vicinity.

_“Oh na na na na na na na na na na na_

_Na na na na na na na_

_Oh na na na na na na na na na na na.”_

For a moment, he felt guilty. Nick probably didn’t know what was happening right in from of his… face? Crotch? Waist?

But then Nick moved again, ending up even closer and putting his head on Andrew’s shoulder. There was now no space between them, and Andrew had a raging boner.

_“I got too high again_

_Realized I can't not be with you_

_Or be just your friend_

_I love you to death.”_

Nick was moving to the music, enjoying the song. Hoffied and embarrassed at what he was going to do, Andrew moved with him. Against his will, his hips gently thrust forward.

Oh, fucking hell. That shouldn’t have felt as good as it did.

He was in trouble. He was in deep shit.

_“But I just can't, I just can't pretend_

_We were lovers first_

_Confidants but never friends_

_Were we ever friends?”_

His hips now thrust of his own volition, but somehow Nick didn’t notice. Overwhelmed with shame, Andrew could think of nothing else of his sheer pervert nature, and that somehow didn’t turn him off.

“Fuck it. If you’re okay with it, I’m okay with it,” Maury said, and disappeared.

_“But when your stitch comes loose_

_I wanna sleep on every piece of fuzz_

_And stuffing that comes out of you, you_

_I took too many hits off this memory_

_I need to come down.”_

The shame kink (was that even a thing? It seemed like everything was a thing these days) was a whole other can of worms to unpack, but at the moment the only thing that Andrew could feel was immense pleasure. It coiled up in his lower abdomen, and as he rolled his hips _faster_ and _harder_ the pleasure just grew and grew. It swept him along, the heady feeling of it had him rolling his head back, eyes closed and mouth agape in ecstacy.

_“An-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-nother day goes by_

_So hold me tight_

_Hold me tight, or don't--”_

And he couldn’t have stopped even if he wanted to. God, this was immense. Maybe he should withhold himself more often, because if it felt like _this,_ then boy was it worth it.

All he thought of was Nick, Nick and his eyes and his laugh and his _mouth--_

Andrew came in his pants with a shudder, twitching though his orgasm and withholding a groan.

_“Oh n-n-no, no this isn't how our story ends_

_So hold me tight_

_Hold me tight, or don't.”_

When his high wore off after approximately a second and a half, Andrew’s mind became crystal clear and was able to process what had just occurred. What Andrew had done.

Holy shit. Holy fucking shit.

Like lightning, Andrew lept off of Nick. He had just gotten off on his best friend. He couldn’t believe it-- it happened so fast. He could feel his cum staining his dress pants, his underwear; a proof of his misconduct. Gross and warm and thick. Just like Andrew. He was one with the cum. Though his panic, Andrew somehow had the mental capacity to appreciate the worldplay.

No, misconduct was too weak of a word for what Andrew had just done. He was a terrible person. Oh God, he was a _pervert._

He was absolutely disgusting.

_“Oh na na na na na na na na na na na_

_Na na na na na na na_

_Oh na na na na na na na na na na na_

_Hold me tight, or don't.”_

And then he realized that Nick was staring at him. “Andrew, what’s wrong?”

Even though he was overwhelmed with panic, Andrew suddenly had a wave of relief wash over him. Nick was so innocent, he didn’t even know that Andrew had gotten off against him.

(To be fair, most people wouldn’t their best friend to rub off against them and come in their pants. At a middle school dance, no less.)

Andrew felt tears fill his eyes, even though his sudden onset of panic shortened his breath dramatically. He was _not_ going to hyperventilate.

He had to do something. Think, you useless piece of shit. Use that big smart brain of yours. You can memorize a billion useless equations, but apparently you don’t have enough common sense to get yourself out of a situation. Andrew’s self-preservation skills apparently weren’t his strongest asset.

Nick was still looking at him, mouth slightly open in confusion, obvious wondering what was wrong. Andrew tried to speak, but the words caught in his throat and the only thing that made it past his lips was the slightest wisp of air.

He tried harder, pushing the words out, trying _anything_ to say something to break the silence between them. The music was still playing and their peers danced around them, oblivious.

“I-- I--”

Nothing else. Useless. He was useless.

Out of options, not knowing what else to do, he turned tail and ran out of the school gym, shoving aside appropriately dancing and normal people, slipping on streamers that had fallen from the gym roof. The multicolored lights flashed around him, outlining his escape in a series flashes.

His voice was still caught in his throat but his breaths came hard and fast. Dizziness confronted him and nausea made its home in his stomach. As he ran, the linoleum of the school floors squeaked under his dress shoes and his glasses threatened to slip down his nose and shatter on the floor.

The bathroom wasn’t too far away from the school gym, which he was thankful for. The boy’s restroom was on the opposite end of the girl’s, and as he ran past the girl’s bathroom he saw two girls making out by its door.

After a second, he realized that it was Jessi, and Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior was the girl across from her using a _lot_ of tongue.

Go, Jessi. Get some, Jessi. He giggled hysterically. At least one of them was having consensual interactions.

Thankfully, Andrew didn’t think that they heard him, judging from the fact they didn’t open their eyes and also didn’t stop eating each other’s faces. He skidded as he finally reached the bathroom door, an ugly beige thing that was cracked and rusty. He pushed the door open, slipped inside, and slammed the door shut behind him.

There was no one else in the bathroom, and the sound rang hollowly off the metal bathroom stalls. How sad would it be if there was another person present to witness his inevitable breakdown?

It was him in the bathroom-- Andrew in the bathroom by himself. (He was sure that that was a song already, but at the moment he didn’t care enough to identify it.) He was alone with all of the other literal pieces of shit.

_“'Cause I'm past the limits_

_The distance between us_

_It sharpens me like a knife_

_Past the limits.”_

He was also alone with the cracked porcelain toilets and the mold growing from the sinks. Had this school ever had a sanitary check in its indefinite years of existence? That was alright with him. He fit right in.

Andrew was beginning to shake, so he went to the furthest bathroom stall and slumped inside, closing the door behind him with a thud. It was the biggest stall, reserved for handicapped people. The cubicle was spacious and the plumbers who had built it had even installed a crumbling sink with an equally ancient mirror above it.

As he walked over to the sink, Andrew took off his glasses and rested them on the side of it, relishing the feeling of the world becoming blurred, undefined. The fuzziness obscured his face as it was reflected in the mirror, and that was a good thing. No one should be be forced to see Andrew more than they absolutely had to.

_“The distance between us_

_It sharpens me like a knife_

_An-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-nother day goes by_

_So hold me tight_

_Hold me tight, or don't.”_

Andrew reached out a trembling hand to turn on the water, gingerly gripping the faucets to release a gush of tepid water. He cupped his hands under the weak stream, waiting for them to fill with water and then splashing it on his face. It didn't help in the slightest. Somehow, the water was as equally grimy as the rest of the bathroom. It felt like he had thrown grease on his face.

Sobs tore from him, hiccuping out and bending Andrew over as he dry heaved.

What would everyone say about him, once they heard about what he had done? Andrew wondered what were the determining factors in his life, besides his antisocial tendencies and crippling yet occasional loneliness and his perverted nature.

He guess he just identified them for himself.

If he became famous one day, he wondered if people would finally want to be his friends. He knew that they’d want this idealized, fictional version of him, but at the same time he was so desperate to have someone that Andrew didn’t think that he’d would care.

It was so sad, and Andrew know this very well. One of his specialties was wallowing in self-pity. He thought that he had a relatively a keen and accurate perception of himself, and he saw both the good and the bad. Andrew mostly see the flaws, though, but that’s because he had so many of them.

The sad thing is, he didn’t really want to fix them. Life was too short to constantly be plugging up holes in a sinking ship. Might as well do something useful while he was here, right?

Or maybe that was the wrong philosophy to have, judging by how his life was going.

He wasn’t sure if other people felt like this. He was so sure that he didn’t have to be alone. Before this, he really only had Nick. But now even Nick wouldn’t support Andrew once he would learn what Andrew had done. The rest of his ‘friends’ probably didn’t even like him, and they were only in the same social circle as him because they wanted to hang around Nick.

He just wished he could find those people, those people who’d come to their social circle because they wanted to be friends with _Andrew._ Though, knowing him, they’d just bond together and he’d be the awkward(er) outside friend, just like always.

Why was he jealous of two people that he created in his own idealized scenario?

Andrew thought, and he thought, and he thought some more. I think there is something wrong with me, he thought. I should probably go to a therapist, but I don’t have the time to do so. Nah, this is myself I’m talking to. I don’t want to go to a therapist, probably because it’s stigmatized, he thought. Or maybe it’s because I’m so afraid to trust anyone, even a totally anonymous person. I think it’s because I’m paying them to listen. They don’t actually care. They’ll just give me scripted phrases that they memorized for their bachelor’s degree, Andrew thought. It’s nothing I haven’t heard already.

It felt like he was lying to himself. He didn’t know why. He guessed that he was embarrassed? That Nick, one of his only friends, would look at him at think, There’s my best friend, who’s so fucked up that he has no friends and stays home all weekend and now has to go to _therapy?_

Andrew returned to himself and found that he was sobbing. He hated this. He hated acknowledging his thoughts, because that’s what he actually _thought._ Because he could then see all the dark places that his mind went to.

What was wrong with him?

_“I'm pretty sure that this isn't how our story ends_

_So hold me tight_

_Hold me tight_

_Hold me tight, or don't.”_

He couldn’t breathe. Fuck.Gasping, trying to force air into his lungs, hands flailing out trying to get a grip on something, anything. He couldn't get a grip. He couldn’t--

Andrew threw up in the toilet. His vomit was bitter and chunks spewed from his mouth and splashed water in the air as they hit the bottom of the bowl.

For a moment, the only thing Andrew could hear was his breath, rasping in his lungs as he tried to stop hyperventilating. The next sound he could hear was his favorite song, tinny and echoing through the bathroom walls.

Welp, that song was ruined forever.

_“Oh na na na na na na na na na na na_

_Na na na na na na na_

_Oh na na na na na na na na na na na.”_

Andrew deserved this.

Andrew deserved everything that was happening to him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now you see why I rated this fic mature lmao  
> Why is the weirdest thing I've posted actually from canon? fml
> 
> The song is "Hold Me Tight or Don't" by Fall Out Boy. Along with "Never Going Back," I listened to those to songs on repeat as I wrote most of this fic during winter break. I strongly recommend you listen to it, b/c it's one of my favorite songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYv-MSO80MA
> 
> Comments make my day, and kudos make the world go round.


	8. Life is Shame

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Also titled "I Was in a Bad Place When I Wrote This"  
> I'm just kidding. I did take my AP Chem midterm today, which went about as Well As Expected: absolutely terrible :) although, to be fair, the rest of the class probs failed right along w/ me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me @ the creators, jumping up and down waving my hands in the air: look I wrote a thing based on ur thing! I love your show!! Notice me!

He deserved this.

Andrew was currently on his knees, prostrating before the filthy toilet as he tried to catch his breath.

That was a panic attack. He just had a fucking panic attack at a school dance. Of all the pathetic things he had done, having a panic attack there among the mold and the mirror shards was among the pitiful of them.

As Andrew gradually continued to come back to himself, he realized that his pants were still filthy, stained from the unidentifiable shit on the bathroom floor and also his spunk from before. Distantly, Andrew felt himself rise to his feet, gripping the handicap bars with his hands and heaving himself up, grabbing blindly for his glasses and jamming them onto his face as the world righted itself in its uncompromising clarity. Swaying, he pulled down his pants, unsticking the disgusting material from his underwear and legs. The least he could do right now, at this moment, was wash them.

The sink was still running from when he had turned it on an indefinite amount of time before, and the grimy water had overflowed and was now dripping onto the floor. Would that clean the floor or just make it dirtier? In his state of shock, Andrew chuckled weakly. 

Holding his pants, he waded through the inch of scum over to the sink, dipping with pants and attempting to wash the cum off of them. Maybe if he got rid of the evidence, the situation could disappear as well, and the game would reset back to its last checkpoint.

As the dirt refused to wash away from his pants, Andrew’s breathing got faster. No; everything had gone wrong today. This  _ had  _ to get clean. In his mind, it was no longer about the pants. It was about what they represented-- the shame and disgrace of who he was and what he did. 

He scrubbed his pants harder and with increasing franticness, and then jerked back as something fell out of the pant’s pocket and into the brown toilet water. It was his phone, his expensive phone that his dad pointedly told him would be the only one that he would ever buy for Andrew. Its screen went black as it died, just like Andrew’s hope for the future and his last remaining trust in himself.

“Fucking hell!” Andrew screamed, and threw the offending pants against the wall of the bathroom. They smacked against the metal with a wet sound, then peeling off the wall and dropped with a resounding  _ squish _ to the floor.

There was a moment of complete silence, punctuated by Andrew’s heavy breathing and the  _ drip, drip  _ of the sink as drops continued to mark the passing time on the tiles.

He froze as the door to the bathroom opened, the rusted hinges screeching in protest.

“Andrew?” A voice called out. “Is that you?” It paused. “Why is the floor all wet?”

It was Nick. This was absolutely the last thing that Andrew needed right now.

Damn it. Andrew was in deep shit. Nick had probably pieced together what had happened and gone to confront him. This could be the end of their friendship. Andrew would feel disgusted with himself, but revulsion was already roiling off him in waves. He was in a filthy backroom, wearing a suit jacket, waterlogged dress shoes, stained underwear, and absolutely nothing else. Dirt and mold covered the bathroom and most of his exposed skin, and the floor was covered in about an inch of muddy water. 

This was a personification of Andrew. Where he went, filthiness followed, both metaphorically as in pervertedness and physically as in dirt. This, however, was a new low for him.

“I’m in here,” Andrew called, his voice shaking. He reached over and finally turned off the sink, fingers slipping as they numbly tried to get a grip on the faucet.

“Um…” Nick said, and Andrew heard the sloshing of water as Nick made his way further inside the bathroom. “Can I ask why?”

If Andrew could feel anything other than self-loathing, he would have laughed. As it was, he just mumbled, “It’s a long story.”

“Can I ask what happened at the dance?”

“What do you mean? Nothing happened,” Andrew defended himself, “Absolutely nothing. Why would anything have happened? What could possibly have happened in the indefinite amount of time that I’ve been gone?”

Nick eyed the bathroom skeptically. “Mhm. So I see.”

“Listen,” Andrew clasped his shaking hands together, trying to get some control over the situation. “Unless I’m correct that you only came to mock me, why are you here?”

“I’m worried about you.” Nick spread his hands, as if that explained everything. “You randomly ran off.”

“I just needed to go to the bathroom.” Andrew crossed his arms defensibly, but inside he still found the indecency to be relieved that Nick  _ still  _ hadn’t realized what Andrew had done. “I found it like this.”

“Really?” Nick’s eyebrows traveled up his forehead as he scrutinized the bathroom closer.

Andrew slumped and put a hand on his forehead, probably leaving a smear of grime there as well. “No. It’s totally, completely, and obviously my fault.”

Nick withheld a laugh, but Andrew knew him too well not to notice. “Oh, Andrew.”

“Do you think this is funny?” Andrew snapped, hating having his anger boil over but despising Nick’s pitying look even more. “I’m sorry, does this amuse you in any sort of way? The bathroom is somehow even more ruined even more than it already was! It’s so bad now that the school will probably have to call HAZMAT because of me! 

“I don’t have my pants. My glasses are smudged and I still can’t see clearly. I’m cold, I’m wet, and I’m miserable. My shoes are ruined and filled to the brim with a delightful combination of sewer water and mold. And this is because of a goddamn middle school dance. Oh, but that’s not all; in addition, I’m half naked, filthy, and I just had a fucking panic attack!”

Oh, shit nuggets. Fudge balls. Bitch baguettes.

“You had a  _ what?”  _ Nick was suddenly deadly serious.

Andrew couldn’t meet his eyes.

_ “Andrew.  _ You  _ promised.” _

Oh, yeah. They had both promised to take care of each other, no matter the cost. Andrew had to stop making seemingly heroic lifelong vows in the future.

“Yes, I had a panic attack,” he whispered, voice cracking. His hands shook and were frigid enough that he had lost all feeling in them. “I’m pathetic and useless, and I just had a panic attack in the middle school bathroom.”

“Oh, Andrew.” Nick sighed. He was probably sick of dealing with Andrew’s incompleteness at being to act like a normal, functioning human being for more than an hour at a time. “Are you okay?”

Wait, what? “You-- you aren’t to ask anything else?”

“Why should I?” Nick shrugged. “You’re obviously upset. Knowing you, you probably don’t want to talk about it right now. I’d rather get you out of this disgusting bathroom and get you cleaned up.”

Why was Nick a better friend than Andrew could ever be? “Why are you--” Andrew stumbled on his words, “why are you so  _ good?” _

“What do you mean?”

“I mean… You’re dancing with your best friend, and then he suddenly runs away with no explanation. He disappears without telling you where he went. You go to find him and discover him in the bathroom just having had a panic attack. Most friends would back away as quick as possible. Most friends would run in the opposite direction. Why’d you come back?” Suddenly, Andrew found himself right in front of Nick. Their height difference was starkly evident, and Andrew towered over him despite his terrible posture and slouch.

Very quietly, Andrew croaked, “Why’d you come back, Nick? I’m the friend that parents tell their kids to stay away from because he’s ‘weird’ and a ‘bad influence’ and an ‘overly terrible person.’ You think I’m a bad person, obviously,” Andrew said, drawing himself into a frenzy.  “Because why wouldn’t you? 

“I’ve done so many bad things and said terrible things to even worse people and everyone hates me.” Tears ran down Andrew’s cheeks, joining the mess on the floor. “I’m a geek and a loser and I’ll never find love-- because I do terrible things and terrible things happen to me. Who could ever love me? Why would anyone even be around me?”

All of these terrible things were tumbling out of Andrew’s mouth and he could do nothing to stop him, so he just watched helplessly as Nick’s eyes grew wider and wider. “You’re the only person, Nick. The only person that doesn’t turn away in revulsion when they see me. You’re the only person that stands me, who actively seeks me out and wants to be my friend. Why would you ever want to be my friend? Why--”

His words were suddenly cut off because something incredibly unexpected occurred. Through his increasingly frantic monologue, Nick had begun to look more and more concerned as Andrew kept spewing his deepest, darkest fears. Andrew expected Nick to sever the ties of their friendship, to cut the cord and burn the bridge and run away as fast as possible.

So it was quite a surprise when Nick got a funny look on his face.

Surprised that Nick hadn’t run away screaming, Andrew could only view in muted astonishment as Nick effectively cut off Andrew’s rant by pulling Andrew’s head down to Nick's eye level by his tie and kissing him.

Nick was kissing him, and it was everything. Nick’s lips were warm and dry, and all that Andrew was aware of was how they just  _ rested _ on his. 

Then his emotions kicked in, filling his consciousness with feeling like flying and euphoria and happiness and the overwhelming feeling of  _ At last. _

So, naturally, Andrew pulled back.

“No,” he said, numb. “Not like this. Not like this.”

It was perfect, but it was wrong. It was all wrong. 

When Nick was supposed to kiss Andrew for the first time, it was supposed to be somewhere nice, like his basement in the middle of a summer night or outside with the sun on their faces and cool wind ruffling their hair. Not at a middle school dance. Not in a filthy bathroom. Not after a panic attack, where Andrew’s emotions resembled a glass structure that lost a fight with a wrecking ball.

Not like this.

He crushed the feeling of happiness, watched it blacken and crumble into ash in his hand. Just like he did to all of the other sources of happiness in his life, because Andrew didn’t deserve any of them.

Nick’s eyes opened, his lashes fluttering against his cheeks. “I, um. Was that… Okay? Why’d you pull back?” A blush spread across his cheeks as if Nick was just realizing what he had done. “Was it bad?”

“No,” Andrew said hastily, but he was still numb, and he couldn’t think clearly. “It was fine, it was good, it was better than good. It’s just-- this is wrong.”

Nick’s face fell, and Andrew’s heart fell along with it. He hated doing this to Nick, blatantly lying to him about what had just happened. He hated how his mind was so addled that he couldn’t phrase that it wasn’t two boys kissing that was wrong, it was the  _ timing  _ and Andrew had just had a  _ panic attack  _ and he couldn’t  _ think-- _

But he had to. He had to preserve their friendship.

It was better if Nick thought that Andrew was a homophobe than know that Andrew was a pervert, become at least there was a chance that homophobia could be fixed. Pervertedness was forever.

Because what if Nick knew that pervertedness was focused on him? What is he knew that he was the object of Andrew’s sexual attractions?

Besides, it wasn’t possible that Nick liked him back. There wasn’t a chance in the entire  _ multiverse  _ that, in some timeline, Nick liked him back. That kiss, that glorious, wonderful kiss, wasn’t even a real kiss. It was a  _ pity kiss,  _ meant to shut Andrew up before he had a chance to spew his plans of murder or something just as fucked up like that. And if there was one thing that Andrew despised, it was pity.

And that’s why Andrew pulled away, gasping, tears were in his eyes. “I’m sorry--” he said, tears forming in his eyes and burning as they trailed down his cheeks, “I’m so sorry, I can’t do this… I can’t make  _ you _ do this, I’m--”

Because, especially now, Nick would want nothing to do with him. Andrew had neatly, effectively, totally and completely obliterated the last good thing in his life.

And, like a proper protagonist, Andrew half-ran, half stumbled away, and the bathroom door slammed soundly behind him.

He was fine. He was  _ fine.  _

Who was he kidding? Who was he trying to convince?

Andrew was not fine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I made a mistake when I posted the drawing in chapter 6, b/c I thought Nick kissed Andrew in "Life is Frottage." I'm going to leave this order for a few days, then I'll move the picture to after this chapter for chronological reasons.
> 
> Comments make my day, and kudos make the world go round.


	9. Life is Original Art

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I couldn't resist.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, this is my art. No, I have not posted anything this raunchy before. This fic is breaking a lot of barriers for me.
> 
> This is how I see Andrew and Nick irl. I hate Kroll's haircut, so I gave him a swoop. You'll have to deal. Also, I visualize Andrew as John Mulaney and I've had a LOT of practice drawing him over the past week.  
> (Left: Nick; Right: Andrew) but I hope that goes w/o clarification.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter is posted.
> 
> Comments make my day, and kudos make the world go round.


	10. Life is a Haze

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Exactly what it says on the tin. 2.1.19  
> Oh shit, it's February already?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As I'm rereading and editing the chapters before I post them, I realize that the winter break of 2018 when I wrote this may not have been my best time, mental health wise.
> 
> However, it's important to distinguish and acknowledge the narrator and the author as two very completely different entities. As I'm posting these relatively angsty chapters, please keep that in mind.

Andrew was feeling feelings, and in addition to being awfully inconvenient, they were also taking a toll on his mental health. He’d zone out at random times during the day more frequently and at greater intervals than before. He stopped interacting with people completely, including Nick. _Definitely_ including Nick.

After that stunt Andrew had pulled in the bathroom, he was surprised that Nick hadn’t yelled all of his secrets to the entire school in revenge for Andrew’s douchebag behavior.

The amazing, astonishing thing about life was that whenever you thought it can’t _possibly_ get any worse, it managed to fuck you over even more.

For example, Andrew’s grades had hit the fucking gutter now that he had ceased paying any attention whatsoever in every single one of his classes. His parents were bickering with each other even more at home, and even though Andrew told himself that it was just that, bickering, he wasn’t so sure.

In addition, he never had anyone to talk with anymore. Missy was always on her phone, now even more than usual because she had her own shit to deal with, and for some reason Jessie still hated him. And Jay was always a fucking psycho, so he was out.

Andrew always wondered how people could always be on their phone and still have tons of friends. He just didn’t _get_ it. Before he started using his phone to escape, he was always present in the group’s conversation. He didn’t usually contribute, because he had nothing worthwhile to say. So, unlike some other people he knew, he kept his mouth shut.

That’s something he noticed recently. Even with his family, he had absolutely nothing to say out loud. He always wondered why, because he evidently had an incredibly active internal life.

Whenever he talked out loud, it was difficult to vocalize the words, for some reason. Moving his lips to form the syllables was awkward, and his voice always sounded strange to his ears. It was always too low or too high or too squeaky, and even his family mocked him for it when he spoke at the dinner table.

He read something the other day about the only way you really exist is how you interact with other people. Was life just how other people perceived you?

That was so scary, because he didn’t think he came off well to other people. To be completely honest, he didn’t really try to. He was always sure he’d regret it later, and he definitely did, but to be fair he hated the majority of human civilization. Shit, it sounded so bad when he actively thought it. Was he a bad person?

Maybe everyone thinks they’re a bad person. Maybe that was just a part of growing up. Nobody’s completely good or bad, just like no situation was completely black or white.

But he _had_ to stop trying to justify the situations he got himself into, the sheer pervertedness of what he had done. But he was _so tired._

He was so tired, and Andrew was so tired of feeling that he decided not to feel anything at all.

That’s why he didn’t feel bad when he passed Nick in the hallway without acknowledging him, or when Andrew left his texts on ‘read,’ or when Andrew refused to hang out with him. Or when Andrew refused to acknowledge Nick’s existence at all.

They used to hang out together all the time to the point of bordering on codependent, but Andrew hadn’t cared, because life was a two player game. As long as they had each other’s back, they’d get through it together. Cool in college, like that one song said. One day it would all become better.

But as of now, everything was shit, and everything was shit because of Andrew. Therefore, Andrew was shit, and Nick didn’t deserve  being dragged down in a sinking ship. Cut all losses, right? Drop the dead weight before it took you down with it.

Andrew’s pervertedness would someday cause something even worse to happen in the future, he knew it. It was his nature to destroy things, to corrugate and contaminate them beyond repair. And he had to ensure that wouldn’t happen to Nick, good and happy and pure Nick, because Andrew wouldn’t allow their friendship to continue, even though ending it was reminiscent of the time he broke his arm, and he was in such agony, but he had to bear the agony, screaming until someone found him lying on the cracked asphalt--

So that was why it was better this way. And if it wasn’t, Andrew would tell himself that over and over again until he believed it.

It was a day in a week, same as any other, except that Andrew was anesthetized and numb. He was walking through the hallway, eyes glazed, dark circles accentuating his hollow cheeks, when Nick suddenly appeared next to him, gasping as he caught up.

“Andrew,” he said, his eyes wide, and Andrew didn’t know why or care, “Andrew, are you okay? Did something happen?”

Andrew shook his head, expressionless. Don’t think, don’t feel. Everything was fine, nothing was happening. “Nothing’s wrong. Sorry for making you think that.”

“Wait, I was gonna ask if you wanted to come over tomorrow--”

“Sorry Nick,” Andrew said, again. “I have to go.”

“Andrew, wait--”

But Andrew was already gone.

If he could still emote in any way, he’d have felt guilty, and he would have been stumbling along, tears stinging in his eyes and wondering why he had to do this.

(Because it would have hurt, it would have hurt like a goddamn bitch--)

But luckily, he had found the perfect anesthesia: pornography.

Porn could make him feel something, but it was detached. He’d been watching an awful lot of porn lately, even more than the frightening amounts he’d consumed of the medium earlier.

Porn was nice. Porn didn’t make him have feelings. When he watched porn, he didn’t have to think about himself. When he watched it, actors fucked onscreen. It was a one-sided interaction-- clinical, in a way. Everything was a formula. The positions were carefully thought out, the actress’ makeup was perfectly applied, every one of their moans was shrewdly calculated to illicit the greatest reaction out of their viewers.

And if Andrew ever felt anything, it was distant. Secondhand. There were no familiar faces, no distinguishing details from one movie to the next as they all blended together. And that’s what happened with his real, actual, physical life. Not caring about anything extended to everything, and Andrew found himself shirking his duties, his schoolwork.

First, it was a homework assignment. Then it was wearing the same shirt twice. From there, it was not paying attention to the lecture to wearing the same underwear three days in a row to not studying for the test at all and then failing it the next day. It went to not sleeping a full night’s sleep to four hours to two.

Waking up was getting more and more difficult as each morning passed by. It wasn’t that Andrew didn’t know he had to-- it was that he didn’t care. What was the point of getting up if everything was going to cycle and repeat itself and then he’d just have to wake up again?

The only reason Andrew got out of bed was because he knew that he’d get to jerk off the next day and then go to back to the sweet bliss of sleep. Because the hollow blankness of slumbered obliterated every detail from his miserable life, and Andrew didn’t have to acknowledge anything.

The only thing that broke up the unbearable monotony and boredom was masturbating constantly. Andrew had been a frequent masturbator before, but now that he was jerking it all the time his libido was more than happy to comply.

The worst part? It wasn’t even difficult, and didn’t physically inconvenience him in anyway. His libido could keep up, even after multiple sessions. If his body had told him to stop, that it was too much, Andrew might have had the slim chance of reevaluating his options. But as it was, he was lost in a sea of pleasure as the days blended together.

School didn’t matter, his family didn’t matter, nobody and nothing else mattered. Because concentrating on the obscene acts on the screen in front of him prevented him from concentrating on anything else.

And so, for an indeterminate amount of time, he drifted through his life, blissful and blank, because nothing mattered anymore.

Andrew didn’t know if he could stop if he could break the cycle that had enveloped him, but he wasn’t entirely sure if he wanted to.

Better to feel nothing than to experience only anguish and pain. Maybe it was better.

It had to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My tumblr is mermaidmayonnaise if you want to discuss the Score (my favorite band) and why [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5wHdUT2a_s) is the best.
> 
> Comments make my day, and kudos make the world go round.


	11. Life is Confrontation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yay? 2.8.19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just watched the Valentine's Day special and whEEZING

While Andrew was sitting at his computer staring absentmindedly at some bondage porn, Maury appeared next to him. If Andrew had looked up from the screen, he would have seen that Maury wore a worried expression.

“Andrew.”

Andrew ignored him.

Maury tapped his shoulder. “Andrew Glouberman.”

He refused to acknowledge Maury’s presence. A long, drawn-out moan came from his computer.

_ “Andrew fucking Glouberman!” _

That got his attention. Andrew looked up from his computer blearily. “What?!” he snapped.

“I’m worried about you,” Maury said bluntly, scratching at his horn.

That was strange. Maury was a personification of his hormones, and Andrew’s hormones didn’t think to check on him very much. Maury usually just gave him boners and weird thoughts and then left Andrew alone to deal with them.

“I think…” Maury continued, “I think that it would be best if you, um,  stopped watching porn.”

_ “What? _ You’re the one that got me into it in the first place!”

“Yes. But,” and Maury looked distinctly uncomfortable, “you’ve taken something beautiful and made it ugly.”

Andrew wasn’t surprised. That’s what he always did. He took perfectly nice things and ruined them. Look at his grades, his life,  _ Nick. _

Nope. He wouldn’t think he-who-must-not-be-named. If he didn’t think about him, then Andrew wouldn’t have to acknowledge what he had done. Andrew wouldn’t have to think about the immense pleasure of thrusting against him, thoughts of Nick and his mouth and-- he stopped himself. Porn had given him too many possibilities of what he could have done. 

Because, if he thought of Ni-- of  _ him, _ then Andrew would remember what a fucking pervert he was. A bad person. A  _ freak.  _ A _ disgrace  _ to _ humankind. _

So it was easier to just not to think at all.

“Uh-huh,” Andrew said, “okay.”

Maury perked up like a puppy. “Really?”

Andrew sneered and turned back to his computer. “No. Why should I?”

“Why?” Maury repeated, exasperated and worried. “Andrew, you haven’t left the house other than school. You haven’t done any of your homework, or talked to anyone, or done anything of any value whatsoever. The only thing you’ve been doing is jerking off.” He gestured to a mountain of socks on the floor. “You have so many jack off socks that you no longer have any clean ones to use.”

“So?”

“So?” Maury yelled. Andrew hated how Maury kept repeating what Andrew said. Why couldn’t he just quietly leave Andrew alone with the porn? “Because you can’t just sit in your room all of your life! You have to stop, or I’ll stop it for you.”

“I’d like to see you try.”

Maury strode over to where Andrew’s computer was plugged into an outlet. He gripped the cord and its plug and pulled on it. Andrew’s breath caught in his throat as he awaited the inevitable death of his computer. 

To his surprise, Maury desperately heaved on the cord, again. It didn’t move.

Distantly, Andrew’s thoughts dissected the situation. Apparently, Maury really  _ was  _ intangible. That meant all of the times of Maury had pushed his body around, that was really Andrew. And when Andrew’s hips had moved closer to Ni--  _ him,  _ then that was of Andrew’s own volition. Muted revulsion crept up his throat.

“Okay, so that didn’t work.” Maury suddenly appeared next to him. “But Andrew, you  _ have _ to quit. Otherwise, something bad will happen to you.”

What? Andrew gave him a questioning look.

“I can’t say.” Maury pulled at his fur, expression twisted. “But trust me, once you go in, you won’t be able to come back.”

Andrew looked away coldly. “I’ll take that chance.”

Maury’s shoulders slumped. “Well, I tried,” he said sadly. “Goodbye, Andrew.” He slunk to Andrew’s closet, climbed inside, and disappeared.

If he was in his right state of mind, Andrew would have been upset at the loss of another friend. Because, in spite of all his teasing and innuendos, Maury had been his friend.

But Andrew wasn’t okay, and so the thought didn’t even occur to him. The only feeling that managed to pervade his unconscious mind was a distant sense of loss. 

Ages ago, when he had wondered why he was so damaged if nothing had happened to him. Andrew didn’t know. That feeling scared him. It was a feeling of uselessness and loneliness, which was distantly permeated with a feeling of emptiness, fatigue. And it sucked not knowing why he felt this way. His parents, thank everything, weren’t abusive or murderers or arsonists. The worst thing about them was his dad’s fatal flaw: attraction to scallops and consequential instant diarrhea. 

He had no siblings, but Andrew didn’t mind being alone. Spending time with Nick, his sole friend, was enough interaction for him, and the hours that he was forced to interact with the people at school more than made up for the rest of his solitary time. 

But still, it felt like he was missing a piece, a vital part of his life. Without it, he wasn’t complete. Without it, he wasn’t whole. Andrew has ruminated on this for endless hours. Everyone had something wrong with them, but when it concerned Andrew, it seemed to go much deeper than that. It bore into his roots, the distinction great enough to set him apart from his peers.

Now that something had happened, he was relieved, in an absurd and terrible way, because now he had an excuse for _ why _ he felt so fucked up inside.

The worst was here; he was living through it. His best friend probably hated him, his grades were in the toilet, his social life was nonexistent, and he was hopelessly addicted to porn. 

And even that feeling of revulsion when he thought of himself went away when he hit  _ play  _ on the video, and the doo-wop music started up again.

And that’s why when a portal opened to his computer, he didn’t hesitate before climbing inside.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I always wondered about Andrew's mindset in that episode. You'd have to be in a certain mental state to even consider going into the PornScape.
> 
> In other news, I have a concert in about two hours. Huzzah.
> 
> Comments make my day, and kudos make the world go round.


	12. Life is Realization

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nick's perspective! Yaaaaaaay long chapter b/c I have no pacing consistency. The next chapter will be in his perspective too, so buckle in.   
> 2/15/19 -1 = <3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Valentine's Day special made me hate Andrew, and that made me sad.  
> In other news: I almost forgot to post the chapter and then accidentally hit myself in the face with my left hand when I realized it was Friday. My friends looked at me strangely. It was at a jazz competition. I decidedly was not wearing a jazz hat.

For his part, Nick was hopelessly confused. 

Nick went to Andrew’s house one day after school and rang the doorbell, as one does in those situations. Andrew’s mom stuck her head out the door and smiled at him. “Hey, Nick! How are you?”

Nick forced a smile on his face. “Good, how are you?” Now with the formal niceties out of the way, “Is A-Andrew home?” He never stuttered. What the fuck?

Mrs. Glouberman’s eyebrows furrowed, as if she was listening to someone shout something inside, but the expression quickly cleared. “Andrew’s not feeling well, honey, I’m sorry. Maybe try again tomorrow?”

“Okay, I will,” Nick said absently, his mind already racing to the next step of a plan that he had just concocted in his head. “Thank you. See you tomorrow--” and she slammed the door.

Nick rubbed his forehead, thinking quickly. Andrew was obviously avoiding him, and Nick had to find a way to get to him. Andrew was obviously in his room doing whatever he did in his spare time. His room was on the second floor, facing the backyard. There was a tree situated conveniently next to his window, and although they had joked about using it as a secret passage/entrance to Andrew’s bedroom, they had never attempted to put the plan in fruition.

Guess there’s a first time for everything.

Andrew was an only child, so there was no chance of anyone seeing Nick break into the Glouberman’s house. Andrew was about as perceptive as a brick wall, and his mother was most likely watching  _ Downton Abbey  _ in the living room. The only people who had a chance of spotting him were the neighbors, and if they didn’t think Nick was weird then they certainly would now. Oh, well. At least no one would call the authorities, seeing how this was a (mainly) Jewish suburban neighborhood. For those suspecting anti-Semitism, that meant that they don’t give a shit. Jews don’t blink an eye at anything. Andrew was Jewish, and he had told Nick, therefore it was acceptable to say.

Instead of sneaking around to the backyard in black and burglar’s mask, Nick simply walked around the house until he reached the other side. He had read in  _ Ranger’s Apprentice  _ that acting normal was less inconspicuous than speaking around and making a big show.

The tree loomed in front of him. Scrutinizing the branches’ alignment on the tree, Nick cursed his height. After about two minutes of fruitlessly jumping up and attempting to grab the lowest brach to hoist himself from there, Nick finally grabbed a lawn chair to assist him. Oh, the humiliation. Andrew would have had a field day.

As he hoisted himself onto the branch, he remembered that this wasn’t the best time to remember his crippling fear of heights.

When he put aside the feeling that he would soon resemble a pancake, it was relatively easy going from there. The branches were close together and thick enough to support his weight. Nick let his mind wander, thinking about what he was going to do next, so he didn’t notice when he climbed onto a dead branch and stood on it.

The branch that Nick was standing on cracked under his feet and fell to the dirt below, leaving Nick hanging by his hands two stories off the ground. If he survived this and managed to help Andrew from whatever mess he had gotten himself into, Nick was going to kill him.

Heart hammering in his throat and suppressing a high pitched shriek, Nick swung like a gymnast and hooked his legs over another branch near him, landing safely and sitting on it to catch his breath. When he finally recovered from his almost heart attack and also his near death experience, he realized that he was near Andrew’s window, and that the window was slightly too far for him to reach and climb onto and into. This time, he couldn’t suppress a angry shriek, which he quickly muffled in his sleeve. 

“God fucking damn it!”

Well, he now had two options. The first one was going back down the tree, conceding defeat, and heading home. The second option…

Better not think about it. C-c-cm’on, go, go, go--

Like an agile cat with none of the dexterity, Nick leapt out of the tree in the direction of the closed window. As he flew through the air and berated what an absolute idiot he was, he put his head down and crossed his forearms in front of his head.

Brilliantly, the move worked. Nick’s elbows smashed into the window panes, cracking them and sending him tumbling inside, rolling to absorb the shock and landing in a crouch. Glass shards lay around him, and it was a miracle that he hadn’t landed on any of them.

Nick brought his head up, astonished that he was still alive and eager to see if Andrew had seen his Spiderman-esque skills. But no dice-- the room was empty. The light was on, though, and the computer emitted a light from where it was perched on Andrew’s desk. Andrew had been here in the past fifteen minutes, or else the computer would have gone into screensaver mode. The lighted lamp indicated that he was going to come back, otherwise Andrew would have turned it off to conserve energy.

Maybe he was in the bathroom. Nick sat down on his bed to wait, because he wasn’t  _ that  _ friend.

Two minutes turned into five, which turned into ten, and Nick wondered what was happening and grew impatient. Also, he was  _ bored.  _

Guess he’d be  _ that  _ friend.

“Andr---?” A hand suddenly muffled his call. “Mf! Wh’t th’ fff!” No, it wasn’t a hand; it was a claw complete with fur and talons. Nick’s struggling suddenly became much more pronounced, and he brought an elbow back and hit the something that had him in the ribs.

The something hissed and let Nick go, bent over and wheezing. Nick couldn’t help but stare. It was enormous, some kind of monster covered with fur. It also had two horns and a beer belly, which reassured several of Nick’s fears, and even further when the monster spoke with a raspy voice with might have been his real voice but also could have been due to getting the wind knocked out of him. “Nick, why’d you have to go and do that?”

Nick’s eyebrows shot somewhere into his hairline. This terrifying, out of shape... monster knew who he was? “Is this some kind of joke?” Unconsciously, he had back up against the wall, inching towards the window. 

Crushed glass clinked under his sneakers. He’d have to get a new pair, when he got home. He bent down without removing his eyes from the monster, carefully grabbing hefty chunk of glass to use as a weapon. If it came to that. You never knew.

The monster looked confused, then smacked his forehead, making Nick jump. “Oh, shit, you haven’t hit puberty yet, haven’t you?”

This did absolutely nothing to alleviate Nick’s concerns or clear up the situation. If crazy adults in monster suits hid in his room around the same time that Nick finally got pubes, he wasn’t sure it was worth the fuss. He gripped the glass tighter, cutting stinging lines up his palms. It looked like he might have to fight his way out of the situation.

The creature, completely oblivious to his (its?) imminent death, continued talking. “I’m a Andrew’s hormone monster. Pleased to meet you in person, my name’s Maury.”

Wait-- “Did you say Andrew?” Nick said, twitching. Unconsciously, he moved closer to the thing, and then suddenly Nick was there next to him, holding the glass to the monster’s throat. Nick had decided that Maury was a him. It had a masculine voice. Sue him for assuming gender when he wasn’t about to stab something in the throat. 

“Speak!” Nick said dramatically, having read too many knight novels such as  _ Ivanhoe. _ “What’d you do to Andrew?”

“Nothing!” Maury said quickly, probably because he sensed that Nick wouldn’t hesitate to slit his throat. Nick noted with satisfaction that Maury remained perfectly still. “I come to help kids once they hit puberty. There’s a whole company out there, and there are tons of us. I’m just an underpaid employee dong my job!”

“Why haven’t I heard of you guys? Why doesn’t sex ed talk about you?”

Even with a shard of glass held to his throat, Maury heaved a genuine laugh. “With  _ this  _ American education system?”

“You have a point,” Nick conceded. In sixth grade, one of the girls had raised her hand and asked if boys could get pregnant. Yes, this is an anecdote from real life. No one could come up with that kind of idiocy.

“Can you lower the glass shard?” Maury said. “It’s making my penises nervous.”

“The fuck?” The glass stayed right where it was. “Also, I think the plural is penii.”

“Nerd. I can see why Andrew like-- nope, never mind. You’re a nerd.”

Nick chose to ignore that. “What’s the penises?-- Penii? Fuck it-- purpose? Molesting innocent children?”

Maury looked horrified. “Fuck, no! Jesus Christ! They… come in handy.”

“I’m not sure if you were serious, or making a pun on being able to hold them in your hand.” Nick lowered the shard. Maybe it wasn’t the wisest, but Maury seemed to be trustworthy. At the very least, he might know what happened to Andrew, so without any transition Nick asked him, and Maury answered with equal brevity.

“Andrew is addicted to porn.”

“I have several questions,” Nick said, reeling. What the actual hell…? How could he not have figured it out? Shit, how  _ could  _ he  _ possibly  _ have figured it out? “But you must be a pretty useless hormone monster if you couldn’t save Andrew from whatever happened to him.”

Maury winced, and it was obvious that that was a sore point for him. “Nick, I did try. I really, really did. But Andrew chose his own path, and we have rules that can’t be broken. I had to let him go.”

That didn’t sound good. “Let him go? To where?”

Maury sighed and sat down on the bed, patting the spot next to him in an invitation for Nick to sit down.  “He got sucked into the PornScape.”

“Can you tell me why? Besides the p--porn addiction?” Nick shook his head, trying to organize his thoughts. “Like, logistically. Where is the porn world? Is it in a pocket universe, or maybe an alternate universe. Fuck, even if it’s real.”

“I wish I could disclose the deets to you, buddy.” Maury sighed a forlorn sigh. “Confidentiality. Sorry.”

“Even in a potential matter of life and death?”

“Especially then.” Maury’s shoulders slumped. “I’m sorry, I really am.”

They sat in silence, and Nick’s mind raced frantically. Surprisingly, porn addiction explained the majority of Andrew’s behavior the past few weeks. He didn’t want to meet up, he never had time-- not because he was avoiding Nick, but because he was addicted to porn.

No, that didn’t really make sense. Andrew had been fine before… Or at least better than he was now. Andrew had liked porn previously, because Nick very vividly knew Andrew’s personal habits, as a) Andrew wasn’t subtle in the slightest and b) Nick could deduce as he had both a moderately competent brain and a pair of functioning eyes. However. Something had driven Andrew to and past the brink of addiction.

Nick thought back to the school dance, thought back and dissected the events even more carefully than he had.

Andrew had twitched when Nick put his hands on Andrew’s waist, and shuddered when Nick had slow danced with him. Those were… signs of revulsion. Revulsion of a same sex encounter. That equaled homophobia.

“Maury,” Nick said, very carefully, “is Andrew homophobic?”

“Oh, my sweet summer child. My precious closeted bisexual.” Maury actually had the audacity to laugh out loud. In fact, he was hooting and hollering so loud that it was a miracle that Andrew’s mom hadn’t run up to inquire about what was going on. She must  _ really _ have been absorbed in her show. 

Chortling, Maury went up to Andrew’s computer, pulled up his porn history, scrolled, and still chuckling, clicked on a video that consisted of a gay men gangbang. Then, he continued to pull up other videos from the search history: a m/m blowjob, anal, rimming, and tab after tab of other sexual acts that Nick wasn’t familiar with and didn’t have a particular desire to know.

Nick covered his face, eyes burning and smarting. “Ah, my childhood innocence!”

“So you see,” Maury laughed, unconcerned with haven taken Nick’s porn-watching virginity, “Andrew is most decidedly  _ not  _ homophobic.”

Nick’s worldview had been flipped upside down, and not just because of the porn. (Why would you stick your fist in someone’s ass?) “But Andrew’s not straight, either.”

“Are you kidding? The kids just about as bisexual as… well, I don’t know any bisexual icons, but think of one of them. He’s just about bisexual as they come.”

“Oh.” That didn’t make much sense, because why else would Andrew be ignoring him? Had Nick done something? He thought back, and he didn’t think that he had done anything or said anything to merit this level of hatred. Then it hit him-- here was a monster (or something) that had been in Andrew’s head for the past (unidentified time). If Maury didn’t know, no one did. “What’s up with Andrew, then? Why’s he been so weird these past two weeks?”

“Monster-patient confidentiality,” Maury started to say before Nick cut him off.

“Don’t give me any of that shit. I’m Andrew’s best friend, and I’m worried what I might have done to provoke him--”

“What, besides his libido?” Maury grinned, and Nick smacked him on the chest with his hand.

“Shut up, I’m serious!” Nick rolled his eyes.

Maury said nothing.

Nick’s eyes were as big as saucers. “Wait, seriously?”

“Of course. Dude’s been in love with you since you guys met, but he only realized it when--” Maury slapped a hand to his mouth, cutting his words off.

“No, no, please tell me when he realized it.” 

“Monster-patient confidentiality,” Maury said and Nick tried incredibly hard not to slap him.

Nick rubbed his temples, feeling like an old man with the problems of a questioning twenty-something year old questioning… well, everything. “Didn’t we break that a while ago?”

“Yeah, but this is the bro code. Bro before hoes.”

Nick gasped, scandalized. “I am  _ not  _ a ho!”

“You’re right, you’re right. We’re not going to sexualize seventh graders.”

Nick had nothing to say to that. Everything was just so weird. Speaking of... “Andrew has a crush on me, huh?”

Maury nodded enthusiastically, fur flopping around his gigantic head. “A pretty obvious one, too.”

Okay, so maybe he  _ could _ have asked Andrew’s parents that questions, or literally anyone else. Sue him.

“So, where is he?”

“Who?”

Nick told himself that he wouldn’t throttle Maury, because a) Nick needed information, and b) he wasn’t sure if bestiality was cruelty towards animals or some bizarre sex thing. “Andrew. Where is he?” 

“Oh, that’s easy. He’s inside the computer. PornScape.” 

The urge to strangle Maury became a lot stronger, and Nick gritted his teeth with enough force to make his dentist have a fit. “What?”

Now it was Maury turn to hold himself back. “I said that Andrew’s in the PornScape. Where is the porn? Think, Nick, where is the only logical place the porn would be?”

Nick stared at the computer on Andrew’s desk, finally putting two and two together. “The PornScape is… inside the computer?”

“Of course,” Maury said, insulted at Nick’s ignorance, “where else would it be?”

“Magazines. Books like the  _ Kama Sutra _ . Cave picture drawings.” Nick got up, picking up a baseball bat from where it had been lying untouched against the wall for the past eight years. Andrew was Nick’s best friend. He knew those things, and Nick  _ also _ knew that the baseball ball would make a suitable weapon. “Are you coming?”

“To where?” Maury said from the bed.

“To rescue Andrew,” Nick said, as if it was obvious, because why shouldn’t it have been? Nick swung the baseball bat in an elaborate pattern from muscle memory, thinking. No matter how weird Andrew had been acting, he would’ve done the same for Nick, although hopefully not in the same situation. “It doesn’t matter that he’s been a shitty friend lately. It’s the right thing to do.”

“How heroic.” Maury picked at his fingernails, or maybe they were talons. They were claws, possibly. At this point, who knew? “Unfortunately, I can’t go with you to the PornScape.”

Nick’s thoughts screeched to a halt. “What do you mean?  _ You _ got him into this mess,  _ you _ help me get him out.”

Maury shrugged helplessly. “I can’t. My body’s under enough stress due to being in this dimension. Going into another dimension would double the entropy exerted on my atoms; I’d implode. And, for the record, I’m not the one who got Andrew addicted to porn. I just introduced it to him.”

The things they taught you at monster school. “So I’m alone.”

“No,” Maury hastened to assure him, “I can open a portal stable enough for you to bring a friend. But just one friend! Any more consciousnesses would cause my brain would short-circuit and you’d all be trapped there.”

“Not saying I want to, but hypothetically wouldn’t being trapped in a porn world  _ not _ be the worst thing that would happen to someone?”

Maury vehemently shook his head. How did the horns not offset his center of gravity? “Not this one.”

“Why?”

“You’d eventually fade away and lose all sense of being, and never be able to instantly connect with someone on an emotional of physical level. Plus, the native inhabitants would eat you alive.”

Scared, Nick shot him a look.

“Nah, kid, I’m pulling this out of my ass. I just know that you’d have no way back. Look, I’m only allowed here for a certain amount of time. If I went back to my homeworld, the portal would have no way of reopening, because only the person who opened that specific portal can open it again. I don’t make the rules!”

Nick thought hard. “If that’s true, then Andrew has already been in there for some time, and you only have however much time left.” He gestured to the computer. “How long has he been in there?”

Maury glanced at the clock, considering. “About three hours.”

“So we have a time limit.”

“You’d better get going. I recommend bringing a friend. I’d suggest--”

“Missy,” they both said at the same time.

“Andrew raves about her,” Maury said and Nick added, “She seems weirdly capable.”

“Well,” Nick said, standing up and brushing off his shirt, “better go make a phone call.” He shook hands with Maury, because it seemed appropriate. They both ignored the lines of blood on Nick’s hands.

“I’ll start setting up the portal,” Maury said, grasping Nick’s forearm tightly. “Opening the portal from the computer is stupid, pointless, and unnecessarily cramped. It’ll appear in Missy’s closet in fifteen minutes.”

Nick nodded and started climbing back out the window, jumping onto the tree branch with much more grace than before and then climbing down the tree. What goes up... must come down. Nick was a genius.

“And Nick?” Maury said suddenly, poking his head out the window and craning his neck to look at him. “Good luck.”

Maybe not.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You, a rabble-rouser: Shout "Ayyyy-oh!" if you were alone on Valentine's Day.  
> Me, sadly: "Ayyy-oh."
> 
> Comments make my day, and kudos make the world go round.


	13. Life is a Rescue Attempt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Posting the new chapter makes me look forward to the end of the week.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prom is in two weeks, and here I am editing my Big Mouth fanfiction that I wrote during winter break. In the immortal words of Maury: "Oy, vey."

From that moment, Nick jumped into action: don’t think, just go. Go, go, go. He stuffed the baseball bat as he far as could into his bag, slung it over his shoulder, and climbed out of the window.

After acquiring a mass of scrapes from the trees from the return trip, Nick grabbed his bike from where it was leaning against Andrew’s house, jumping on it with practiced ease and pedaling to Missy’s house. 

As Nick whizzed past the houses that composed his neighborhood, trees and roads flashing by him and the wind whipping his hair against his face, he realized that he had a phone call to make. If Nick didn’t come back from this excursion, he should at least call his family to say goodbye. 

Using very improper and unsafe bicycle riding etiquette, concerning that he was riding a bike without a helmet (gasp!), Nick fumbled his phone out of his pocket and dialed the Birch’s home phone number. 

The dial tone droned for a few seconds, enough for Nick to count several heartbeats as he breathed to himself,  _ Please pick up, please pick up, please pi-- _

“Hello?” Nick’s father answered the phone, voice patching through brief fuzzes of static.

“Dad. It’s me.”

“Nick?” Yes, Dad, it’s your youngest son. Judd would only call if he was on death row and facing the chair. “Why are you calling? Is everything alright? Did I forget to pick you up from some activity at school?”

“It’s Saturday.” Nick’s father never picked him up at any time in Nick’s brief and possibly endangered life. If Nick could have smacked his palm on his forehead, he would. “But no. I just called to check in.”

“Oh, that’s nice, son.” The couch creaked as his dad shifted on the couch in the background. “What are you up to?”

“I have to go somewhere,” Nick said carefully.

“Where are you going?”

Ah, fuck it. “To rescue Andrew from the porn world. Ah, I meant PornScape--” because if he was going to go all the way, he might as well… go all the way.

“Okay, buddy,” his father said, and Nick heard the rustling sound as he flipped a page in his magazine. “Have fun and use a condom.”

Whatever that meant.

“--PornScape,” Maury grumbled from the phone, correcting him, which had apparently turned into an impromptu conference call, “It’s called the PornScape. We got a cool name, so please use it.”

Nick made sure that his dad had hung up the phone before he hissed at Maury. “And I did!” Nick whispered furiously so his dad wouldn’t hear.

“And I thank you for it.”

“Why… the fuck? How- and more importantly  _ why- _ are you on this call?”

“You’ve arrived at your destination,” Maury said in his best GPS voice before disappearing with a rush of static and leaving Nick seriously considering Andrew’s assigned puberty preferences.

Parking his bike in Missy’s driveway, Nick ran up the pavement to her front door and hurriedly rang the doorbell four times, shifting from one foot to another.

Missy’s fully dressed mother (Nick had heard a vivid retelling of the Korean spa story) opened the door, and Nick yelped something also the lines of, “Hi-I-gotta-go-bye!” before diving inside the doorway and racing up the stairway to Missy’s room.

Missy looked up at him as he arrived panting and out of breath, kneeling on her pink carpet. “You’re here. Good. I cleaned out my closet and packed a bag full of supplies that we might need: a flashlight, a single sleeping bag, a change of clothes, an umbrella, trail mix, and an amateur porn how-to guide. You know, just in case.”

“How are you so calm about this?” Nick panted, bent in two and gasping for breath due to the exercise and stress.

“Calm?” Missy’s eyes twitched. “I am anything but calm. I’m worried about Andrew. I’ve seen how he’s been acting these past few weeks, but I’ve been too busy dealing with my own shit that I haven’t had time to acknowledge it, and now it’s too late, and I’ll have to live with that guilt for the rest of my life, especially if we don’t succeed with this. 

“But this mission is more important. Saving him takes priority over my personal fears. If what you’re saying is true, Nick, we gotta save Andrew.”

Missy was a better person than Nick would ever be. “You are the hero we needed, but not necessarily the one that we [this fandom] deserved,” Nick said honestly.

“Thanks.” She checked her watch. “We have-- oh,  _ shit-- _ thirty seconds until the portal activates. Did Maury tell you how to access it?”

“No, I was in a bit of a rush. He said that we’d know what to do, and I quote, ‘If Andrew could do it even you could do it too.’”

“I guess we’ll find out!” Her eye twitched again, and she smacked her left hand over it.

“Did your eye just twitch?”

Missy ignored him. “Let’s check the closet.” She ran over to it and flung open the door. “Oh, holy fucking shit.”

If Missy’s parents had heard her, they would have scrubbed her mouth with soap. Nick ran over to her, then stopped dead in his tracks, mouth hanging open. “Oh,  _ fuck.”  _

The portal was there in the closet, all right. The only accurate way to describe it was a hole in space, similar to what Nick imagined a black hole would look like. Similarly to a black hole, it was a... hole. Similarly to a black hole, it was streaked with stripes of fluorescent colors. Shades of purple and blue and green all swirled inwardly in an endless spiral, bleaching the colors from Missy’s effeminately colored room.

The effect made Nick equal parts fascinated and nauseous. He looked away.

“Oh, don’t be a baby,” Missy said, still staring at the black hole. “Do you know what this means for the scientific community?”

In retaliation, Nick pushed her in. 

Missy screamed as her pigments of color were drained from her, then her physical body, and lastly her incorporeal form. Her incorporeal form was misty and gray, like a ghost. If he had to guess, that was her soul.

Fascinating. He numbly watched as all of the components of Missy Foreman-Greenwald swirled down the drain of the tear in space-time and her empty, unsupported backpack thumped to the floor.

A few seconds later, he felt an inward tugging in his stomach, as if the portal was trying to pull him into the world as well. He resisted for a couple more seconds just for the hell of it, and then quickly realized that the pull was a physical one. Objects around the room rattled on their shelves as they were pulled closer to the hole, and the areas nearest to him were painted in greyscale. Therefore, Nick stepped closer to the gravitational force, just like a normal sane person.

He wasn’t sucked in and vaporized instantly the way Missy was, maybe because he had more control over his will and movement, so he took the opportunity to touch the portal with his pointer finger. Unsurprisingly, the tip went numb as it dissolved three separate times and wisped away, and the nothingness of the portal and its streaks of color rippled as though he had thrown a stone in a still pond.

When he took his hand away, there was only a stump where his finger should have been, and the hand itself was incorporeal (AKA Ghost Mode). In spite of himself, Nick giggled like a toddler, because on the other side, his finger was laying sadly on the ground all by itself. 

Deciding that enough of his sanity had dissolved along with his right pointer finger, Nick gripped his backpack strap with the remaining, color bleached left hand and stepped through the portal. He braced himself for an unpleasant feeling when he transitioned through space-time, but the only sensation he experienced was the cool rush of mist as he emerged on the other side.

The first thing that Nick checked for was his clothes. Finding them both a) intact and b) on his body, he looked for Missy and found her standing a few feet away from him, staggering around in circles and having attained a distinctly green cast.

“Having fun?” Nick asked her. In response, she stumbled several steps away and threw up in a bush.

Speaking of looking ill, Nick checked for hands for all his appendages, and upon finding all ten fingers in their proper places, curled them together and fist-pumped.

Missy suddenly bolted straight up, frozen in the process of wiping vomit from her mouth. “Sh!”

Nick didn’t move a muscle. Very, very quietly, he said, “What do you hear? I can’t hear anything.”

Missy’s eyes darted around frantically, the whites of her eyes rolling. “Exactly.”

And then, at the same time, they turned and faced each other and said, “Ambush.” Simultaneously, they whirled around one hundred and eighty degrees and surveyed the view

“Porn people,” Nick whispered.

“Why?” Missy said. “Actually, don’t tell me. I don’t need to know.”

Nick said nothing, scanning the treeline with squinted eyes. There may have been a possibility that he needed glasses.

“Will the porn people need identification of our sexual maturity?” asked Missy as she copied him and surveyed the scene. “Because my chest definitely isn’t big enough.”

“I hope not,” Nick said, thinking of his own sad, delayed development.

Objectively, in a normal world, the PornScape was a very nice place with surprisingly pleasant natural scenery. The beach’s sand was crystalline and white, and its ocean extended to the horizon as the waves lapped at the shore. The sun reflected off of the water, and Nick squinted again, this time at its setting rays as it stained the sky in the reds and oranges of a picturesque sunset.

It would have been picturesque, if not for the crowd staring at them.

Thousands of people looked unblinkingly at them with blank eyes. They were from all races, genders, and heights because porn addiction could affect anyone. The only trait that they had in common was the same dead look: mouth slack, eyes half-closed, back slumped. The only thing missing was the word BRAINS emblazoned in a speech bubble above their heads.

“These poor, sad people,” Nick whispered, so terrified that he resorted to humor. “So deprived of porn that they had to make their own.”

“That’s why I brought that How-To guide,” Missy breathed back.

“Wait, really?”

“No!” she hissed, and her fingers twitched as though she was restraining herself from whaling him, which Nick was grateful for.

It started raining because it seemed the world was conspiring against them, and as the downpour blocked out the sun, it splashed buckets of liquid of Nick and Missy, making their shoulders buckle. 

Nick’s mouth unconsciously opened in surprise, and then promptly closed it as he gagged from the bitter taste. Terrified, he looked up, and almost wet his own pants. Not that it would have mattered, because there was a platform directly above them that had people doing exactly that over them.

“I never wanted to know what piss tasted like, ever,” Nick said, suppressing panic at the sight of the mature pissers ominously standing fifty feet above them. Although to be fair, the phrase ‘mature pissers’ with no other context was ominous on its own.

“Now I  _ really  _ wish I had my umbrella,” Missy grumbled. 

Then they turned towards the forest and ran for their lives.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wonder if more people will read this when its completed, but I appreciate the ones who already do so much. 
> 
> Comments make my day, and kudos make the world go round.


	14. Life is a Climax

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The chapter title's a double entendre, just like the first chapter. 3.1.19 (wowee this year's flying by)

After two minutes of running in the opposite direction of the beach, Nick quickly realized that they were completely lost. The beach had melted into a densely wooded forest, and their vision was obscured by the enormous palm fronds that littered the both trees and ground.

They stopped in their tracks as a huge building loomed up in front of them. It was some sort of temple, a Greek architectural marvel that was made out of polished black stone. They skidded to a stop in front of it, craning their heads back to survey the entire structure.

“Is that--?”

Nick nodded. “I think we found Andrew.” Because only Andrew could be that melodramatic.

The entrance was marked by a simple door. Now that he was here, at the end of all things, Nick felt strangely calm, because this was it. This was what he was destined to do, what the story had been building up to. What he would do next was crucial. There was no point in being scared and nervous, no point at all.

Besides, why should he be nervous? This was Andrew, his friend, who Nick had known for the majority of his life. Sure, he’d been acting weird for a couple of weeks, but everyone had their ups and downs. Even if you hit the low, it was only temporary. Everything could,  _ would  _ get better.

At least, that’s what Nick told himself as he stared down the doorknob. For a fantasy world, it was awfully detailed. The knob was delicately sculpted, slightly scratched yet polished from an indefinite amount of times used and--

“Nick?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re stalling.”

Nick jerked himself out of thoughts. “Oh. Right.” He reached toward the stupid protruding piece of stone, willing himself for his hand to move further, to lay his fingertips on that cold, dead--

The trees behind them rustled as the crowd of (zombies? Porn addicts that were sucked into this world and were never able to escape? Did they need an elaborate backstory?) people appeared behind them, completely silent. It was eerie. It was--

What it was Nick never learned, because his breath caught in his throat and he froze up and he couldn’t move, because there were just so many of them and he was  _ terrified _ , terrified like he had never been in his life, and then Missy grabbed the doorknob and twisted it, kicking the door open and shoving Nick inside.

Nick slammed through the doorway, gasping and out of breath as he lifted himself onto his elbows, palms flat on the obsidian floor in an attempt to recover his wits, Missy right behind him.

A set of stairs led up to the chair, and there was someone sitting in the chair. In the chair, a black silhouette was illuminated by a backlight. They looked familiar. They looked like… Looked almost like--

“--Andrew!”

Then the perspective switched, because Nick had come here to do what he had to do. Now it was up to Andrew.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Andrew, sitting on his throne, just looked at Nick when he burst through the door, fell on the floor, and yelled, “Andrew!” with a hoarse voice and a look of astonishment on his face.

Nick was here, but why should Andrew care? Porn took care of Andrew’s useless feelings by burning them away in a sea of pleasure.

“What do you want?” Andrew said, his tone sounding flat even to his own ears.

Nick ran up the endless obsidian stairs to Andrew, gasping at the physical exertion and hissing at the long red scratches on his shins. “Andrew,” he said. He sounded desperate. Why would he sound desperate?

Andrew said nothing.

There were tears in Nick’s eyes. “Andrew. You can’t just sit around, waiting for something to happen. And when something  _ does _ happen, you can’t shunt it to the side, or ignore it entirely. You have to deal with it, because that’s the only way you can really be better. You  _ have  _ to be _ better.” _

Andrew tried to think of something else. If he didn’t acknowledge it then it wasn’t true. He was the Porn God. Gods didn’t fail, didn’t have flaws or imperfections. Therefore, everything Nick was saying was invalid.

Nick gripped Andrew’s face. “You aren’t listening!” Then, almost to himself, he said brokenly, “Why aren’t you listening?”

Andrew couldn’t say anything to that, because if he responded, Nick would know that he was getting through to Andrew. Andrew’s walls were crumbling, and he hurriedly poured water on sand and slapped it on the mental walls in an attempt to salvage the barrier. But it didn’t work, because this was Nick, and Nick always managed to break through all of Andrew’s barriers.

Nick ran a thumb on Andrew’s bottom lip lightly, so lightly that Andrew almost didn’t notice. “Why? What can I do make you notice?” Nick’s voice cracked. “Notice  _ me?” _

If Andrew had a heart, it would have shattered upon hearing Nick’s tone of voice. But he didn’t, and nothing changed.

“Andrew,” Nick said softly, so softly, “why are you addicted to porn?”

Oh, fantastic. Andrew felt a rush of anger burst through him, because of course Nick knew. He had found Andrew in the PornScape, after all. But that made Andrew so angry, because Nick was capable to do anything he put his mind to. Whether it was making friends or sports or social situations, Nick could do anything. And Andrew couldn’t.

Feeling inferior wasn’t even a fraction of the cause of Andrew’s boiling anger towards Nick-- towards anyone, towards the world. How did everyone know how to act, what to do, what to say? Everyone had a great life, friends, sports. But  _ why didn’t Andrew? _

It wasn’t fair. It simply wasn’t fair that everyone that he knew was outside having fun, going to movies with their dates and carpooling to amusement parks together. Taking pictures with smiles real and bright and  _ real,  _ while Andrew had to paste a fake one on or he wouldn’t even be invited to be in that situation in the first place.

How Andrew wished for friends. He wanted companionship, that warm fuzzy feeling where you’re lying outside on the trampoline in your backyard, and it’s dark in the middle of summer yet there’s a cool wind blowing through the air, and your hair’s spread out and the trampoline shakes as you giggle and roll over to respond to your friend’s joke.

Andrew had that once. Now he didn’t have it anymore, because he was so selfish that he wasn’t satisfied with the one true friend that he had. He was alone, again, just like he deserved.

Nick was looking at him expectantly as all these thoughts thundered through Andrew’s mind, and suddenly that anger boiled over and Andrew shook himself free from Nick’s grasp and howled in pain and confusion. The sky rumbled with thunder and a bolt of lightning shot out and hit the ground outside, sizzling and smoking.

As the lights flashed in the room, Andrew yelled at the one true friend he had lost, screamed at the unfairness of the world and sobbed at his desperation. Everything he did wasn’t enough, not for him, not for Nick, not for anyone.

“Because porn provides escape!” Andrew screamed, tears running freely down his face. “Porn doesn’t cause me to have  _ feelings, _ or feeling incompetent. I can distance myself from the world, because nothing that is happening on the screen is happening to  _ me!  _ Now do you understand?” 

“No.” Nick’s face showed hopeless confusion, but he also looked terrified, and he was openly crying now. “Why would you want to distance yourself from the world?”

“Because--” Andrew spread his hands, “because I’m sad! I’m lonely! I do bad things! I’m a fuck-up! What part of me  _ doesn’t _ merit disgust?”

“Did…” Nick’s voice shrank significantly in volume, “did you say ‘lonely’?”

If Andrew had feelings, he would have instantly berated himself for telling Nick these things. It must have stung to hear that your best friend was lonely. But he didn’t have feelings, not anymore and so the cold meanness inside of him curled in black vines around his throat spoke instead.

“Yeah,” Andrew sneered, and the roof above them cracked open with a massive tearing sound, and rain poured in sheets, soaking them both instantly. “Did that hurt your feelings, to have your best friend tell you that  _ you  _ weren’t enough? That  _ you _ couldn’t fill the gaping hole of loneliness inside of me?”

“But that’s not my _job_ ,” Nick cried, tearings intermingling with the water spattering his face, “I’m not responsible for your happiness!”

Andrew shouted louder to be heard over the rain. “Oh, that doesn’t matter. But you did ask. Would you like me to tell you how I use to cry every night, wishing for emotional intimacy and more than a single friend? How I used to think that no one else wanted me other than you. And that you were probably stuck with me since we were best friends when we were younger?”

“N-none of those things are true,” Nick whispered, too horrified to shake his hair that was clumping in front of his eyes.

Andrew laughed bitterly as he stepped forward and poked Nick with his pointer finger, and Nick stumbled back as he tried to keep his balance, slipping on the floor. “Yeah, okay,  _ Nicky.  _ You keep telling yourself that.” He leaned forward. “Did you know, Nick, that I wanted to kill myself? I legitimately wanted to die. I still do, in fact. The world would be better off without me.”

“NO!” Nick lunged towards him, and lightning flashed again as he stretched his fingers in a desperate attempt to reach Andrew, but the inhabitants of the porn world- who had arrived, gotten past Missy, and snuck behind Nick- held him back with their bondage equipment. 

“Yes,” Andrew said, and he was grinning at being able to take down Nick with nothing but the absolute truth, because the truth was that Andrew was cracked and broken inside, and he couldn't be fixed because he was past the point of no return. 

Something wet dripped onto Andrew's porn shirt, and suddenly he realized that he was sobbing too, and that Nick was crying with him, for him, because of him.

The rain died down to a gentle drizzle, defeated.

“I can't be better,” Andrew said, and his head bowed as he looked at his hands twisting with each other, and that was the truth, so simple that he didn’t realize it before. “I can’t be better because I’m not worthy of it. I’m not worthy of love.”

With heroic strength reminiscent of heroes from the stories of old, Nick tore himself free from the net of ropes holding him in place. In a second, he was kneeling by Andrew’s throne where Andrew knelt, bent by sadness and desperation and probably lack of breath. 

“You  _ have  _ to be better, Andrew,” Nick said, simply. “Because you’re the only one who can help yourself.”

And then, for the second and probably last time in the short remainder of Andrew’s life, Nick put both of his hands on the side of Andrew’s face and kissed him, hard.

Caught by surprise, Andrew stiffened, and Nick pulled back.

“Did it work?” Missy called from the entrance, still beating back a horde of mature pissers with an enormous sparkly purple dildo.

Nick looked at her hesitantly. “I didn’t feel anything.”

“I didn’t feel anything either,” said Andrew, like a liar. But the truth was, the rain had stopped. And as the rest of the roof caved in around them, the dawning sun flooded the room in a glorious blaze of light.

Because he  _ had  _ felt something the moment Nick’s lips touched his. It was… surprise. Surprise? Surprise.

Shit. 

Surprise was an emotion.

Something slammed into his gut, and Andrew bent over, wheezing. An additional weight settled on his shoulders, leaving him groaning. Had his emotional burdens turned physical in this porn world? 

The weight increased the more seconds passed by, and Andrew crumpled helplessly to the floor like a rag doll. His fingers grasped in the air, trying to grab onto something, anything. Air rattled in his throat as he tried to gasp a breath, wheezing as his throat constricted.

Before Andrew lost consciousness, he opened his eyes to view Nick standing over him triumphantly. He was framed in a halo of light, and standing majestically, he seemed… all-powerful. Immortal.

“You’re the only one who can help yourself,” the god said, smiling smugly, “but Missy and I are going to get you out of this porn world so you can do exactly that.”

As the last of his strength failed him and he lost consciousness, Andrew’s head slumped back and hit the hard stone of the floor. 

The world went black.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next chapter's an epilogue of sorts. I'd love some validation (a 'hey there, i'm alive' in the comments if you've been sticking along with the story. Love you guys :)
> 
> My tumblr's mermaidmayonnaise. Not a ton of Big Mouth stuff there, but I post random things tht appeal to me.
> 
> Comments make my day, and kudos make the world go round.


	15. Life isn't a Resolution

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 3.8.19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song lyrics pasted in this chapter belong to "Don't Stop Dancing" from the show BoJack Horseman. I'd recommend listening to [it.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDkV4jAY0ro) I also used Bo Burnham's lyrics to "Make Happy" b/c it consistently makes me sad.
> 
> Last chapter. It's been a time. I hope you guys enjoyed reading this story as much as I enjoyed writing it.

_Life is a never-ending show, my friend_

_A twisting, turning, ever-bending show_

_The audience is everyone you know, my friend_

_Leave them with a smile when you go!_

The world blurred back into focus.

Andrew was in the cafeteria. There were no details, because it was the same cafeteria that he had been in a hundred times and he knew it completely. He made his way down the endless aisles of tables, looking for his usual lunch table.

He suddenly noticed a group of teenagers huddled near the wall, whispering frantically. They were crowded around someone, conversing in hushed tones, and it seemed like they were hiding the person from view. Andrew couldn’t mind his own business and leave well enough alone, so he took a small detour and went to see what the hell was going on, social anxiety of walking through loud crowds alone be damned.

He set his lunch tray down on a nearby table and pretended to tie his shoes, furtively sneaking glances at the group. There were nine kids, who all looked to be about high school age. They must have been actual high schoolers, partially because Andrew didn’t recognize them from his middle school, but mainly because one of the boy’s sweatshirt said _Middleborough High School._ Eight of the high schoolers were clustered in a circle around a girl, and when they shifted, Andrew realized that it was the girl from his gym class, the one who stopped the dodgeball like she had known that it was coming.

They were all talking and waving their hands frantically around her, as she soundlessly reassured them and rummaged through her backpack. The bag was a solid tan color and unassuming, much like the girl herself. Like it could just slip into the background effortlessly.

It was a simple bag. But sometimes, function was more important than form.

_Now the show is done._

_I hope that you had a gut-tremblin' or something resembling, fun._

_And if you watch this thing alone, you probably didn't laugh,_

_But maybe a few times you exhaled out of your nose._

“Where are you going?” a curly haired, pale boy with freckles asked her.

“Will you be back?” another boy in an oversized red hoodie and headphones said, as another (very pretty) girl with hoop earrings added, “Of course not, remember the whole alternate universe thing?”

Alternate universe? What the hell? Andrew tried to call her name, but he realize that he had dubbed her as Mystery Girl and since then had never bothered to learn her name. But still, he had to know what was going on, anxiety be damned. His life had been weird enough. “Hey, Mystery Girl!” he shouted in the direction of the group.

She looked up and smiled at Andrew. How did she know he was referring to her? “Hey, Andrew!” She motioned for him to come close to the group, so he shuffled over.

Hoop Earrings looked him up and down with disgust, which wasn't usual. “Um, who’s this?”

Mystery Girl smiled. “This is my friend, Andrew Glouberman. At least, I hope he is.”

“You aren’t yet, but you can be,” Andrew found himself saying. “You don’t know me, though. I even don’t know your name.”

“Oh,” she jumped, “my name’s Ma--”

“No!” Freckles Kid said. “Universe rules! If you give your name you won’t be able to go back!”

“You’re right, Jeremy. But all of my friends are here,” she said, eyes widening in realization. “Every book I’ve read, every television show or musical that I watched, everyone’s here in this cafeteria, or in some version of this universe.” For the first time that he’d seen her, Mystery Girl looked lost. “What if… what if I don’t want to go back?” she whispered.

_But if you hated it, that's fair._

_But either way, could you find a little more time for a parting questionnaire?_

“I think I know a few things about that,” Andrew said, thinking back to the time where he was in the porn world.

“But fiction-- these fictional worlds are better than my world, which, now that I think about it, is my reality,” she said, tucking a strand of curly hair behind her hair. “No one can hurt me here.”

Reality is subjective, Andrew thought, but he still had to chose his words carefully, wanting to convey what he had learned. “It may feel safe, and it may be cool and comfortable--”

“Comfortable?! It’s everything I ever wanted.”

“Let me tell you a story,” Andrew said. “Once upon a time, I made a mistake, and that took me somewhere else where I thought I was happy. I too thought I had everything I wanted. It was a way to… to get away from my mistakes, my past, who I was. I wanted to _forget_ who I was. I wanted to be someone else, anyone else other than me.”

The girl stared at him incredulously. “But that sounds amazing!”

“I thought so too, at first. But then after my friends got me out, I realized something. The world that you make can cater to your every need, or bring your favorite characters to life. But you have to remember something. It’s _your_ world, and _your_ life.” Andrew took a deep breath. “And nothing, _nothing_ can make up for that, even if you think that place is everything you ever wanted.

“Because the only life worth living is the life you already have.”

She stared at him. “When did you get so smart?”

Andrew repressed a shudder. “Let’s say I had a… similar experience. But, luckily for me, my true friends made me realize what needed to happen and got me out in time.” He smiled at her. “I’m going to try to be that friend for you.”

“Oh, but Andrew, you already _are,”_ she cried, and threw her arms around him in a fierce hug.

For a second, he stood there stunned, than hugged her back. She was unexpectedly pretty for a nerd, he realized. He never would have dared to do that before. He guessed facing actual dangers helped with inconsequential things like that.

“Fuck, I never cry. I don’t know what’s gotten into me.” Mystery Girl wiped her eyes as she released him after one last squeeze. “I understand better now. For a seventh grader, you’re dangerously insightful.”

Andrew bowed. “I learned from the best.”

She blushed and then ran over to the group suddenly checked her computer, which she had taken out of that inscrutable backpack. “Bye, Andrew, I have to go,” she said. “Gym class with you was… well, it wasn’t fun, but it was, shall we say, a time.”

“Are you leaving already?”

She smiled sadly. “Yes, I have to leave very soon. My world is calling me back.”

“Calling you back? Does that mean you’re important there?”

“No, I’m definitely not.” She laughed wistfully, but that didn’t hide the fierce spark of hope that burned in her eyes. “But someday, _someday_ I hope that I will be. Sometimes all we want is to change something, to make an imprint on our world. Because if we managed to impact something bigger than ourselves in some way, then that means we did more than survive.

“When we throw a story out into the void, we hope. We selfishly yearn that this thing we created, the story we slaved over and held dear to our hearts and minds, impacted other people besides ourselves; altered them in some miniscule way. Maybe once in a while they’ll think of the story and remember it with fondness, recognition, even admiration. And I think that’s one of the best things we as humans are able to do, and I think it's beautiful.”

_On a scale from one to zero, are you happy?_

_'Cause you're on your own from here, so - are you happy?_

_I'm open to suggestions - are you happy?_

_But what the fuck kind of question is, "Am I happy?"_

Her computer started to power up on its own, flashing sporadically, and an electric shock visibly ran up her arm. She almost dropped it in surprise, wincing. “Listen, Andrew. I have to go. I’m going to… catch the last train out, or the equivalent of that in your reality.”

Andrew started, reaching out a hand. “Wait! I don’t know your name!”

The curly haired boy, Jeremy, was holding hands with Headphones Kid. “She’s the Author, didn’t you realize that by now? She helped us make sense of our story, and she’ll probably did the same for yours.”

Suddenly, the cafeteria fell silent. People started stepping out of the crowd: kids, adults, even a few anthropomorphic animals. Andrew recognized a few book characters-- the boy with shaggy hair and glasses, there was a horse and a pink cat accompanied by a golden lab, a boy holding a pen in one hand and the hands of a curly haired blond in the other, a boy with eyes of flame next to a boy with a seven foot sword, a woman wearing the FBI outfit next to a man, a man with a blue dragon, a smiling man with an NYPD badge, and on and on and on…

Everyone stood in the cafeteria, completely silent, staring at the Author, whose cheeks flushed as she registered their combined gazes. There was a rustling sound as every single person raised their hands and saluted her.

Her eyes swept the room, recognizing every single person there and nodding to them. “Thank you,” she said, and there were tears running down her face, “thank you so much for bearing with me, guys. You’ve helped me more than you’ll ever know.

“I used to think it was a shame that I was reading about all these fantastical adventures and I’d never get to experience them in person, but I was wrong. I was there with you-- all of you-- every step of the way. I can never repay the favor of going on those adventures with you. They’ve impacted my life so, so much, and shaped who I am. I would not be the person I am today if I didn’t encounter you guys on the bookshelves. And I know that sounds so fucking cliche, but it's ineffably true.”

She paused, and then a phone started ringing. A man in sunglasses and a trenchcoat-- was that Neo from the _Matrix?--_ walked up to her and handed her an old fashioned phone, which she picked up and held to her ear.

_I really wanna try to get happy._

_And I think that I could get it if I didn't always -_

_Panic every time I'm unhappy, like I'm owed some -_

_Life where I'm always, like, happy, which is stupid -_

_'Cause I wouldn't even want it if I got it - wait._

_Oh God, my dad was right._

Suddenly, music started booming, echoing around the cafeteria, loud enough to rattle the trays. What was the song? The one whose lyrics have been interspersed through the chapter.

“It’s my time,” she said. “Thank you so much, everyone. And thank you most of all, Andrew. I hope you find happiness.”

Then the computer in her hand flashed a brilliant white, and the light lit up the entire room. When Andrew finished blinking the spots out of his eyes, she was gone, vanished into the air.

After a few seconds, he looked around the cafeteria. Every single one of the characters, including the group of teenagers who had been guarding her, had disappeared as well, replaced by the students who actually belonged in his middle school. It was over. Everything was back to normal, back to the way it was.

Except it wasn’t. Andrew was different. He had changed, and wasn't what mattered,  here at the end of all things?

He walked to his cafeteria table where _his friends_ sat. Very deliberately, he grabbed Nick by the shoulders from where he was sitting at the table, turned him around, and kissed him on the mouth hard.

They kissed for a long time.

“Woah,” said Nick when Andrew pulled away. “What was that for?”

“I’ve realized a few things. And I’m going to try to do the things I want to do. It doesn’t matter what people think of me, and I’ve decided to stop caring about that. All that matters is that I’m happy.”

“So you’re ready?” Nick looked right into his eyes, and his gaze pierced Andrew to the essence of who he was-- or maybe who he wanted to be. “Are you finally ready to live your life?”

_So if you know or ever knew how, to be happy,_

_On a scale from one to two - now, are you happy?_

_You're everything you hated - are you happy?_

_Hey Ma, look, I made it. Are you happy?_

“No,” Andrew said honestly. “But I’m ready to try.”

And then he woke up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Only the last chapter was a dream. Don't think too hard about it.
> 
> End notes: this has been a story about me. It didn’t have a clean, happy resolution because life isn't like that.  
> I’m having a shitty year, but I’m trying to make every day better than the day before.  
> It’s hard, but I’m trying. I’m trying, because I’ve already hit the low.
> 
> Comments make my day, and kudos make the world go round.

**Author's Note:**

> _I've already hit the low, oh, oh, oh, oh_   
>  _I've already felt the cold, oh, oh, oh, oh_   
>  _So I'm never giving up, never gonna crack_   
>  _Never giving in, never going back_
> 
> This is a completed story. My tumblr is conveniently 'mermaidmayonnaise,' and it's where I post all of my fanart and I am 175% ready to scream about things we both hyperfixate on there.


End file.
